Open space preserved %
thomas harbinson
Teresa Gallagher
Harder than it sounds. That’s what NVCOG ran into when they began putting together their open space map for the region. How are you going to define what is protected open space? Because if it’s strictly by deed restrictions, then Indian Well State Park is not protected open space, for example. Also a number of our open space lands and conservation easements would not qualify. There will be a filed map showing that an area is “open space” or protected by a “conservation easement to be filed”, but then you look and there is nothing on file. Or maybe there is a conservation easement on file, but it’s an easement that has so many exceptions that people can do almost anything except put a building there. There are so many shades of gray. And then lets say you decide not to include properties for which you can’t find a rigorous deed. Moving forward, could someone interpret that as implicit permission to put up a shed or clear the trees there? What are the unintended consequences of saying a list of properties are not fully protected? I don’t think you can go back and deed-restrict them.
Also, sometimes I look for a deed and I can’t find anything. But I’m not a title-researcher, so there might actually be something on file that I just couldn’t find.
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Teresa Gallagher
By the way, I was just working on a spreadsheet of conservation/pedestrian easements for cross-referencing the files in case GIS is not available (attached). This version is organized by street and includes the agricultural PDRs, private open space, buffer areas that can be clear but not built on, etc. I found the majority of these by flipping through every filed map one at a time, so they are in the cabinets sorted by the number of the filed map in most cases.
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thomas harbinson
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Teresa Gallagher
My understanding of deed restrictions, at least in the form of easements, is that some other entity needs to be granted the right to enforce that restriction. If you place a restriction on yourself, you can ignore that restriction because no one was granted the right to enforce it.
But if the restriction is in the name of, say, the Nature Conservancy, then you can’t violate the restriction without the approval of the Nature Conservancy. And if you do, the Nature Conservancy can file a lawsuit against you. Typically a conservation easement over private land here is held by the City of Shelton, or maybe the State of Connecticut. So we can enforce that because the easement has provisions for that.
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thomas harbinson
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