Mary Anne Piacentini Interview, Part 2 of 3

  • DT: Mary Anne, when we left off on the last tape, we were talking about your tenure at Katy Prairie Conservancy and I was hoping that you could give some background to what you're discussing for those of us who aren't really familiar with the situation out on the Katy Prairie.
  • Maybe you could talk first about prairies at large and what's happening to native prairies across the state and then, maybe more particularly, what's happening to the Katy Prairie.
  • MAP: Right. Well, actually a, around the world, of, I think there's about less than one half of one percent of the prairie ecosystem. It is really being destroyed wholesale, I mean, its very difficult to, and, and there are some, some beautiful prairies that are, you know, trying, they're trying to be maintained, like the Blacklands Prairie.
  • But there's actually a huge project that the Native Prairies Association is doing to map all the extant prairies in Texas and then to try to find ways to protect them. And they're doing a great job, but again, a lot of them get plowed under, a lot of them have been developed, a lot of them even have been destroyed, you know, with agriculture.
  • And if you look at the Katy Prairie, which again, historically, nobody's quite sure how bi, big it was because they didn't have surveying marks back then, but people think it was about a thousand square miles and it was just a part of a larger prairie system that went all the way from the Gulf Coast up through and into Canada.
  • And our Katy Prairie as we know it, we think, started at about Loop 610 and went to the Brazos Wiv, River, all the way west, north up to a little bit beyond 290 and down below to 1093, which is Westheimer. So below I-10.
  • And if you had gone there in, before Europeans had settled in this area, the Native Americans had grasses that often were five, six, seven feet tall and probably about seventy percent of the area was covered with these grasslands and about thirty percent was these small, well, I shouldn't say small, anywhere from a half an acre to twenty acre wetlands.
  • And they could be just as, about eighteen inches high. They were not very deep and they weren't wet all the time. They were, you know, wet seasonally or when wet periods came, kind of about four months out of every year.
  • Then when the European, and, and the, and the Native Americans actually managed the grasses through fire, some of it was, they actually lit and others when lightning would strike and those kinds of things.
  • And one of the importance, reasons why fire was so critical to the management of the prairies is were in what's called an ecotone and were kind of in the middle of the country, where the, you have the, the forests on the east and the plains on the west and were kind of a hybrid.
  • When it's really wet, the trees move closer west. When its really dry, the plains move farther east and so were kind of a hybrid in a way. And so when we people think, oh, its always just grasses but it isn't. There are, you know, forbs and there are scrub and there are trees, but it depends on the season.
  • And, and one of the reasons that the Native Americans used fire is that there's an incredible substructure for trees and one of Katy Prairie Conversancy's staff people always likens it to a, the rainforest, but flipped hundred and eighty degrees. So when you're in a rainforest, you look up and you see these beautiful trees and they're, the growth is way, way up and there's all kinds of things on the understory.
  • Well, for us, yes, its about six or seven feet high, but you might have eighteen feet underground and what that does is it holds water. So when you have a fire, you destroy the trees that are there and the shrubs and the bushes and the forbs. Its the grasses that grow up first and now you might say well, why would they bother to do that?
  • Well, of course, the Native Americans were doing it because they needed the wildlife, their food, to come closer to them because they didn't have guns. They didn't have bows and arrows. They had to find a way to get the, the deer and the bison close enough to them so that they could kill them so that they could have food.
  • When the Europeans came, they did a couple of things. Early on, they did not settle out in these wilder, swampy areas because they just thought they were mosquito infested and they dipped and they weren't flat and they didn't think they were suitable for anything.
  • But they were intrigued with the bison that were out there and so they, a lot of them came and they would bring their rifles and they would come on hunting parties to the point where, as you know, I mean, really, we no longer have bison on the Katy Prairie.
  • I mean, they really, they just, they left them to rot. They didn't use them for food the way that the Native Americans used them. They didn't use them for clothing. I mean, they used, I don't think they left one part of a bison or most of the other animals unused.
  • I mean, very much like Alaskans in that way, that they felt like this was their sacred trust. They, if they were going to kill it, they had to use it all. But when the European settlers came and visitors came and especially when the railroad started in, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they had shooting parties. And they would just shoot indiscriminately.
  • Also it became, you know, harder and harder for the Native Americans to kind of put fires there and some of the European settlers began to see it as actually someplace they could tame and they could actually grow rice because there was so much water and it was relatively flat.
  • And so you found that in the, the early 1900s, they started, the rice farmers started coming in and started plowing up great areas. And then, again, it wasn't destroying the wetlands, but it was certainly, you know, reducing large swaths of, you know, native plant materials and tall grass prairies.
  • It was further degraded when they began to be able to level it with machines, so that instead of having these wonderful little bumps, you could level a rice field and you could get the water exactly right where you wanted, which is great for growing rice, not so much, not so great for the kind of system that you'd had there before.
  • And, and a lot of it was plowed under. I mean, at the heyday of rice farming, there was probably seventy thousand acres on the Katy Prairie that was in rice. And we look at the Katy Prairie, you know, you talked about a thousand square miles, anywhere from five hundred thousand to seven hundred and fifty thousand acres, you know, of the prairie.
  • And so if two thirds of that, a lot of which was plowed under, made it hard to grow that back. Now there still are some wonderful native patches of prairie and one of the things that's really important about that is a lot of people are talking about, you know, planting native materials, whether its because they want them to be drought resistant, which they are.
  • They want them to be low maintenance, which they are. Or they just, they like the way they look. You really want seed from about fifty mile radius. Well, if we don't work really hard to save the few remaining patches of prairie that are there, were not going to be able to restore this.
  • And our long-term goal is, and I don't know if it'll be that seventy-thirty split. You know, it, its hard to know that, but we hope that if we get, let's say we stay at eight, eighteen or twenty thousand acres. You know, we'd like, you know, a few thousand acres to be back to tall grass prairie.
  • We'd like, you know, maybe one or two, well, we've already got twenty-five hundred acres of wetlands that we've helped enhance or re-create or restore. And so if we want to do that sort of, you know, two to one kind of thing, you know, that means at least we've got to put five thousand acres into tall grass prairie and maybe more. But we need the seed.
  • So one of the things that were doing is were identifying where are those nice patches of prairie and how can we enhance them? One we've got this little ten acre patch called Williams Prairie. Never been mowed at all. I mean, not mowed, I should never been in agriculture, been hayed
  • But it's, it's beautiful. Its got some incredible seed that were collecting, that we are using then to produce a coastal prairie nursery. And that if we can grow Big Bluestem and Little Bluestem and Rattlesnake Master and Indian grass and Switch grass and those kinds of things,
  • then we can provide the seed to perhaps have it come back, not to look like a garden, but actually maybe to look like the old native prairies that were there. We also just recently purchased a property that we did with a, we, we turned it over to a conservation buyer and we had a biological survey that we did on it in inventory.
  • And we had probably two-thirds of the property is pretty darn good prairie. Ten acres are the most beautiful patch of Big Blue Stem that you could ever imagine, just phenomenal. And we had Fred Smeins from Texas A and M come out and he's kind of jaded now.
  • He doesn't think there's much good prairie left. He was practically jumping up with glee when he saw this and said what are you going to do? How are you going to do this? Now because we don't have a lot of cash for acquisition right now, we actually did sell it to a conservation buyer.
  • But he's agreed to let us collect seed. He's let us keep it in it; he's not going to plow it under and those kinds of things. But, you know, it's, it's very difficult and one of the one of the other reasons that it's difficult to protect prairie is that it's a subtle beauty.
  • Walt Whitman said that, you know, if, if, when people think about America's most compelling landscapes, they think about the, you know, Yellowstone or they think about the Rockies or they think about the jagged coast. But truly, he said the plains and the prairies are America's most characteristic landscape.
  • But a lot of people, when they come out there especially if you're not in the middle of a tall grass prairie and you're just kind of looking at it and you have to really look for it at this point, they look at it and they don't get it because it's not like the, when the snow geese come in and they blacken the sky and you can hear them with their characteristic s, calls.
  • It's not like a, a bald eagle swooping in and you think wow, America's national bird. It, you have to really look carefully and, and a lot of people will talk to me and they go why do you want save a bunch of brown grass? And I go well, you haven't been to the prairie in it's four different seasons because it's not brown.
  • I mean, you, you have green grass, you got purple grass, you have rose colored grass, you got blue grass. I mean, you have, you have amazing colors. You have wildflowers and they're not just, you know, the, the bluebonnets and these little itty bitty ones. Wh, I mean, sure, we have those.
  • We have, we have the largest population of the endangered species Hy, Hymenoxys Texana or Texas prairie dawn in Texas today. And its a, it's a flower that's about this big and you can only see it la, for about three weeks. But it's amazing because it's indicative of other kinds of things that are there, kind of a saline substructure, you know, of, of earth and a salt dome kinds of things.
  • And we look at harvester ants, which when they're coming back and they'd been destroyed almost, we thought, by fire ants. When you see harvester ants come back, which are, I think, the Houston toad and I'm not the best person in the world on animals, but the Houston toad, that's their food source.
  • You know that things are starting to get healthier and I think that's, that's one of the, the most compelling reasons why you want to save some of the last great places, as The Nature Conservancy would call it, but for us, saving the Katy Prairie is, is that it speaks to a health of a region and you want that. I mean, if you have absolutely no wildlife except for fire ants, can't be a very healthy place for you.
  • And, and our prairie does so many things. I mean, it's not just that its wonderful for the sort of the, the beauty of it when it's, it's in its flowering seasons, but it also provides food and cover for three hundred species of wildlife. It's not just the migratory wirewater fowl.
  • We have lots of, of neotropical migrants that come through to us. We have a lot of resident things. We have a lot of mammals. We've already, I think one of our staff people has already come up with twenty-six different types of reptiles that we found there. And, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop these incredible lists and, you know, you look at Texas as a whole.
  • It's far more diverse in terms of its wildlife than any other state in the country. And people say oh, no, can't be more than California and it isn't. Has more species than anybody else in the country. And we can't lose that and with a state that has so few public lands, you know, we have to depend on the kindness of the private landowner.
  • But we also need to work harder on making those lands accessible. You know, we, we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, my experience when I was young. My parents didn't have, I mean, they took us to the ocean, they took us to lakes. That was their, their idea of the out of doors and how wonderful it was.
  • But they, you know, they were working class people. They, you know, routinely worked long hours and so we didn't, you know, go on hikes and they didn't know about camping and that kind of thing, so I didn't grow up with that. And there are so many people who will come out to the prairie with a school group and they're scared to death.
  • They don't know what to expect and you have people that even go to the arboretum and they go ooh, this is scary. What am I going to see? Well, we have got to teach our children and, and I'm a, I'm a perfect example.
  • I mean, my kids are severely allergic, they don't really love being out of doors and yet, I think they've begun to learn the value of conservation, whether it's, it's not using plastic bottles or it's yes, you can walk places as opposed to driving. And even if they don't go to Big Bend, Big Bend ought to exist and the Davis Mountains ought to exist. And so I think they appreciate the fact that the Katy Prairie is there.
  • And, and I think one of the other things that's important about the, the Katy Prairie or any of these natural areas is for us, because of the wetlands and because of the grasses, we help both water quality and air quality because wetlands are nature's kidneys.
  • So the, the water that goes there, when it comes out of those wetlands is much reduced in terms of its sediment and pollutant offloads and the grasses themselves are great for sequestering carbon. Better than trees because if you say that trees are good for carbon sequestration and saplings are better, guess what? Grasses are great at it. So you know, there's so many reasons to save it. DT: I guess you mentioned some of the reasons, everything from the open space and to the educational value for your kids to the water quality features to the air quality and carbon sequestration you said. But I guess it'd be another aspect of it would be simply that its rare and it's getting rarer
  • and I think you brought us through some of the land use changes that we've seen out there from the, I guess, departure of the Indians and the end of that sort of fire regime to the construction of the railroads and the hunting parties and then into the deplaning of the prairies and use for rice production.
  • I guess the next step would be some of the residential construction that's happened out there, road construction and some of the airport proposals. Can you talk about those three; maybe just give us a few examples that could help us understand the kinds of forces that are starting to impinge on the prairie?
  • MAP: Right. Well, actually, interestingly enough, they started in 1984 when the City of Houston bought what they affectionately called West Side Airport and it was in Waller County and it was right in the middle of the Katy Prairie.
  • And there was an expectation that that airport would become the next hobby, the hobby for the west side so that people on the west side didn't have to drive all the way to the southeast side. And there was a great sense among the environmental community that that was just not a good idea.
  • But land was cheap, the, I think there were a lot of people who felt that it was the right place for it to be. There was a confluence of influential people, a lot of money and good land prices and willing sellers and so they said the airport was going to be there.
  • In 1999, I think that, or maybe 2000, the environmental community actually teamed up with lots of people, conservationists, hunters, ranchers, farmers, other airport people, pilots, and said this is not a good idea. It's not only a good idea because we don't need it out here, but you're going to endanger pilots who are coming in and out of here because there are so many geese in the air.
  • If one gets sucked, sucked into a jet engine, it can take the engine down or it can break the windshield, it can destabilize the plane and it, it's really not a good idea. And there was a lot of work done.
  • I think ultimately the reason that the airport didn't happen was because there was a sense by the City of Houston and the, I, I don't know if there were lessees or, or the major tenants at Intercontinental and Hobby that there wasn't a real need for an additional airport.
  • That they still had so much hangar capacity and terminal capacity that you ought to fill those up first. Make, make traffic easy to them, but fill those up first. And so that airport went away, we thought.
  • And it became a sight in which Intercontinental could do its mitigation for the expansion of the Bush International Airport and so six hundred acres of the fourteen hundred acre proposed West Side Airport became a mitigation project. A few years ago, and, and remember that that was going to be done with federal funds.
  • So they had to meet federal environmental impact sta, state standards, but really, truthfully, it was probably political influence of people like the, the tenants of the different airports and, and the fact that there wasn't a population out there. It was probably not going to make money.
  • A few years later, I think in probably 2005, a gentleman who has lots of money decided that he wanted an airport, pretty much just south of the old West Side Airport. And while there was a lot of hew and cry against it and he had some public hearings about it, the truth is is that he didn't depend on public funding now.
  • He will eventually, he says he won't, but, but everybody knows how much it costs to produce an airport and even though he's incredibly rich, it's probably the case that he will get some federal funding, he's built an airport there. And right now its a corporate jetport.
  • Eventually, I think he is already negotiating for contracts with UPS and FedEx and different groups. There's railway that's proposed there. It will be a major hub and it probably will become the new Hobby Airport. So that threat is there
  • and we already see, hear more, which you know, of course, as, as long as they're not buzzing the wetlands, it's, it's not going to, you know, stop the, the wildlife from roosting and resting there, but it's definitely bringing a lot more activity. I think the thing that's, well, there, there are two things that I think have really brought the most change to the prairie.
  • One is the anticipation of roadways, whatever they are, whether they're the Grand Parkway or the expansion of I-10 because, as J.B. Jackson, as I told you earlier, you know, that he says that he thinks that they, the thing that most fuels growth is the location of a roadway.
  • It's not the growth itself, its not the anticipated need, its where you place the roadway and the roadway is often placed far in anticipation of the need for it. And there might not even be need; it actually develops the need for it. And so, you know, you had this sense that there was going to be a grand parkway there and there was a lot of opposition to it.
  • But, but there was still clearly a sense that that was it. Also with the expansion of I-10, people thought I can move farther west and I can still work downtown because now it's going to be an easier commute. Well, that's not true and it'll probably never be true because I think the, the roadways that, the, the, the use of the roadways expand as quickly as the roadways are developed
  • and then they're clogged again and they need more room. But that has put a, amazing pressure on it, but the real pressure, I think there are two pieces. One is that there aren't a lot of controls in the county so people think, ah, they build in the floodplain, can build in the floodway. I'll just mitigate for it. Ill build up or I'll, I'll raise the, the land four feet so it won't flood and they get away with it.
  • And the second thing is is the relatively inexpensive cost of land and the availability to assemble large tracts of land. And a perfect example is there was a wonderful estate on the Katy Prairie called the Longenbaugh Estate. It was about sixty-three hundred acres and it was in an estate.
  • For the longest time, the value, the, the guidelines that the donors who had put it in, it was their estate, had been, it was to support medical research. And I think that the gentleman who was the lawyer, who was the executor of the estate because they had no children, felt like eventually real estate was not the best avenue for him to be in.
  • He wasn't really making enough money with real estate and he wanted it in stocks and bonds and index funds, et cetera. And so he put it on the market and he wanted to sell it for thirty-three hundred an acre. And we felt like oh, it's to the east of us, it's thirty hun, three hundred dollars an acre.
  • We've never spent more than about twelve hundred and fifty. Certainly, nobody's going to buy it. Just not going to happen. Well, we were wrong. It sold for thirty-three hundred an acre and the gentleman who bought it also got mineral interest.
  • And about, mmm, two years after he bought it, he was about ready to put it into foreclosure. He was, he was really could not afford this large tract. And along came the Rouse Company. Great master plan, you know, great corporation who does master planned communities on the east coast
  • and they bought it from him at ten thousand dollars an acre, knowing full well that the preferred route of the Grand Parkway was right straight through the middle of this tract. And they assembled about ten thousand acres
  • and they planned twenty thousand seventeen to twenty thousand homes, about nine hundred acres of commercial development, the roadway through it and it is literally about, mmm, a mile from our eastern boundary. And what it did is, a, and they're, they're a great development company.
  • Don't get me wrong, they, they really know what they're doing. It's now owned by General Growth Properties, actually, that they were Rouse was absorbed by General Growth and they do a lot of development in, in Nevada. And they, they're, they're good planners, they o, own the majority interest in the woodlands.
  • But what it made people realize is whoa, if they're out there, I could be out there. And so there's been a lot of speculation and now land probably costs twenty thousand dollars an acre and it's far more difficult for us to buy land or convince a farmer or a rancher that they want to sell it to us when the land might be their retirement package.
  • It might be the only thing they have to leave to their children and maybe their children don't care about the conservation values of it. Maybe the landowner doesn't care about it. And even if they do, they can't really give up twenty thousand dollars? Three thousand dollars. Guess who's going to win. These guys. (misc.)
  • DT: Mary Anne, when we left off, we were talking about the development of the prairie and the impact of having a road that has frontage on the property that you might own and what it does to land values.
  • Can you talk about one particular road that I think you mentioned, just the Grand Parkway, a loop road that would circle Houston and maybe some of the ways it's being planned, the ways the environmental reviews have gone and what sort of impact that has on land protection?
  • MAP: Right. Well, the Grand Parkway would be the fourth loop around the City of Houston, more than any other metropolitan area in the United States today because we have 610, we have six and we have eight or I guess, it's eight, then six. And so the Grand Parkway was originally s, s, proposed because it was an evacuation route and we have no feeder streets or, no, what do you call them? (inaudible)
  • MAP: No, they have ramps, but it, it wouldn't have feeder roads and it would be really used to get people out of town. And so they decided to do it in segments and there are different segments that go across different parts of the region.
  • And ours is Segment E that goes through the Katy Prairie and o, one of the things that's really hard to do is that there have to be these environmental reviews for them because there are a lot of federal funds that are involved in this. And so they're looking at the impacts just of those segments. They're not looking at the broader picture of what does this do to the whole area?
  • Does it increase the chances of flooding? Does it cause no wildlife corridors because there are no passages through? Does it destroy sensitive vegetation? Does it destroy wetlands? And so one of the things that, of course, the groups that are looking at the Grand Parkway must do is to decide, I mean, that, that are proponents of it, must decide okay, it does this, this and this.
  • But they never put all the segments together to say this is the culminating impact of it, if you consider it as a whole because I think many people in the environmental community really are looking at two issues. They're looking at the need because, you know, truthfully none of us in the, I don't think in the environmental community want to stop growth.
  • What we want to do is manage growth and we believe that there ought to be ways to find a bail, balance between the things that people think are wonderful about a region and the things that get you where you need to go and, and help you do your work, get to play, do all the things that you need to do.
  • And so sometimes people will say to me, oh, if you run the Katy Prairie Conservancy, you must be against growth. And I say no, we're not against growth, but you know, the truth is is that I love living in the neighborhood I live in because there was a sense that they wanted to have green space near it.
  • There was a sense that the features that were important, whether it was the trees or the water, were critical to the nature of that area, to the, to the, the sensibilities of its community, the people that wanted to live there. And I said I think we have to recognize that as more and more people move to the region, we have to get smarter about the way we grow.
  • And that may mean that not everybody gets to have a typical suburb, suburban house. Some people will but some people, if given an option, would choose something else. I, w, I was in a meeting today about transportation and one of the things that they were saying is that the Department of Transportation, our TxDOT, is really not just about highways.
  • It ought to be about transportation and it ought to look at what are the other opportunities for transportation. Now you might decide you really want to drive a car or I might say I never want to drive a car again. I love to be able to sit on a train, read my book, listen to my iPod, sleep, drink a cup of coffee, do whatever I want or Diet Coke, Diet Coke, in my case, and, and just relax to get to where I want to go.
  • And I might be willing to take a little bit of an extra pain that, you know, it might take longer to get there or it might take a little more trouble, but it's an option that I have. If you don't give people that option, of course, they have to go to their car
  • and, and I look at Houston and I think the kind of saddest thing that we had, and you have to remember that, you know, with my, you know, urban and regional background, I care about more than just, say, conservation. I can remember the 1990 mayoral election in which, you know, Bob Lanier voted, I mean, campaigned on making our roadways great but getting rid of rail.
  • And I think that was probably one of the saddest days we had in this area because, again, I don't care how many people want to ride in their car and want to drive and be protected. There are a lot of people who would much prefer to take light rail or, you know, take a train and there are a lot of people who only have that option.
  • Don't have the ability to have a car. And I just, I think its kind of sad that we'd all voted to, you know, tax ourselves and then all of a sudden it was okay, we got to have another vote. We have to have another vote. We have another vote. And you know, you sit there and you think Houston could be probably a much different place if you had options.
  • And it's the same thing with growth. Do, does everyone have to live on half an acre of land, a quarter of an acre of land, have a cookie cutter house, have, I just, you know, as I told you, I, I live in a neighborhood I love, and they're going to build right next to me.
  • And sad to say, though we have deed restrictions, we have no zoning, they're going to put a house that they're going to probably fill three feet to lot line all the way around. And you know, the quality of life isn't going to be quite so good then.
  • So, so one of the things that I hope all of us in, when we, when we think about the work that conservationists do, environmentalists, even more (?) do or people who develop parks or people who plan streets is that you think about the impact it's going to have, not just on you, but on the next generation and the generation after that.
  • I certainly hope that if somebody sees what we've done in, whether it's in Hermann Park or it's in Katy Pra, Katy Prairie is that eventually they're going to say wow, thank you. You, you really did understand that, yes, I want to live here. Yes, I want to have good schools and a nice house and, but I also might want to walk.
  • And, and you know, another reason that it's so important when you look at this whole region, were pretty flat area and so it's hard to control flooding and one of the things that, that we do with holding large acreage, not as pavement, not as developed building, not as roadways, is that the water can sit there for a while.
  • And if we ever get to our dream and our vision of creating tall grass prairies, it's going to hold water longer. Well, people downstream should be paying us to do that because it's going to help them not flood because where do the waters come from? They come from the upper watershed, Cypress Creek, from Waller and Hempstead.
  • Places far above the City of Houston. But the City of Houston ultimately will flood if those waters remain unchecked. And so there are so many reasons why you wish that people who are in positions of power and influence recognize that what they do tomorrow and what they do today really affec, affects so many future generations
  • and, again, II just, I look at certain neighborhoods and I think, wow, people were really smart that developed those. How come they were so smart and how come we're not as smart? And part of, I think, is, is, is it's not just vision, it, its harder and harder to realize when you're in a, a growing city like Houston that in order to make money, you may have to give up something.
  • And maybe giving up something is that little extra space. I, I look at West University, which is a little city surrounded by the City of Houston and there are people who built their houses to the lot lines and then they bought the lot next door to them so they could have a yard.
  • It's unfathomable to me that people do that. And so I think one of the things we ought to do is say let's save you from yourself. Let's save you from your stupidity. But let's also save you, save future people from your, you know, your stupidity. I don't mean to be on a soapbox, but I think we have to think about those things and, and one of the things that we have to think about is smarter ways to grow.
  • And, you know, I, I work a lot with, with a lot of different groups and a lot of the groups are looking at smart growth movement, they're looking at garden cities. And that may not be for everybody, but it may be for enough people that the people that want strictly suburban development can have it,
  • the people that want to be in a high-rise, who would've thought that there'd be a number of high rises in Houston where there's so much land. Want to live in a loft? You want to live in a highly walk-able area? You know, let's give everybody options. Let's not just do kind of cookie cutter development.
  • DT: Before some of these lands are developed and developed as lofts or single family or multi family or towers, you know, fortunately there's some open land that's still left, that hasn't been affected by the Grand Parkway or by the airport or other pressures.
  • I'm curious what options a group like yours has to protect those lands, especially when they start getting very costly and, you know, there's fee simple, which I guess works when things are relatively inexpensive. But as they get more expensive, it seems like you get into managing things for multiple purposes, for multiple owners.
  • You know, you got conservation easements and I was hoping that you could talk about the Freeman Ranch or the Warren Ranch or other purchases and arrangements you've made to protect lands.
  • MAP: Well, you know, interestingly enough, there are probably about forty land trusts in Texas and it's a pretty new movement in Texas. Much older on the East Coast, where I think Boston had the first land trust ever and even on the West Coast. And so were kind of young, we're kind of feeling our way.
  • Most land trusts do not, other than The Nature Conservancy, don't really hold land. They use all those other techniques. The Conservancy has Katy Prairie Conservancy has gone the fee simple route simply because it's not just that the land was cheap, it's that's what the landowners wanted to do. They didn't want to stay on that land; they really wanted to cash out.
  • But there were a few people that didn't want to do that and the, the most wonderful one was a gentleman by the name of Merle D. Freeman and Merle had a property that we really wanted. It was right across from our Nelson Farms, our first acquisition and it was, it was just, you know, it was productive soils.
  • It was a, a ranch and it had been a rice farm and it was a great piece of property. It was about nine hundred acres. But Merle D., he didn't want to sell it because he loved that land.
  • And all of a sudden, I, I knew he couldn't afford to donate an easement, which is basically a legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust or a qualifying nonprofit that restricts certain kinds of activities, m, most principally, development. But you can still build a house on it, you might even be able to subdivide it, but you can't you can't really develop it the way that a subdivision would be.
  • And so I knew he couldn't do that and all of a sudden, I learned about something called a PDR, which is a purchase of development rights. It's essentially, just like a conservation easement, there's a bundle of rights that a landowner gives up, there's a bundle of rights that a landowner keeps.
  • But in exchange for giving up those rights, the landowner gets paid the difference between what he could sell the land for if there were no restrictions and what he could sell the land for if there were restrictions. And in the case of the Freemans, they got about sixty-five percent of the value of the ranch as a payment.
  • And the wonderful thing about it was is that their sons, and Merle D, unfortunately, didn't live to actually execute the agreement and to enjoy the fruits of his efforts. In other words, he wanted to go motorcycling off into the horizon. He was about eighty years old, but he loved motorcycles. He was pretty much a wild man, our own Marlon Brando of the Katy Prairie.
  • And he, but his sons, especially one of his sons, just adored the ranch and he really was trying to make a go of it and he couldn't. And this allowed him to recapitalize his ranch and his mom continued to live there. Derek manages it as a cattle ranch,
  • but he's also started a pretty active horse stabling business and, and then his brother Dicky, who had a pretty hand, I would say a small but semi okay little auto mechanic shop, was able to get some of the equipment to kind of move to the next level. And they, they were able to keep the two houses that were on there and build another house.
  • Now yes, they, they give up some things. They can't have a commercial feedlot on there. They can't destroy the productive soil, so there's certain things they have to do. That means that they can't probably have cattle and overgraze it. So they can have a certain number of cattle, but they're under a plan that we worked out with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's natural resources conservation service.
  • But in exchange for that, they got a lump sum payment and they got the knowledge that their, their land would be protected. The other thing they got is that the value of the land through the estate was reduced because when you strip those rights off of it and they passed it down, they will pass it down from the parents to the children, it will be at a lower value, the value with the easement on it.
  • So it worked in many different ways for them. We've had other people who've donated conservation easements, both for the immediate benefit that they get for the tax deduction. And under the most recent pension act, there was a increase in those benefits over the last two years.
  • They're trying to make that permanent or at least extend it for another year until they can make it permanent from something like thirty percent of your adjusted gross income up to the value of the duc, deduction to fifty percent of your adjusted gross income. And no longer was it just a initial year plus five years, it was an initial year plus fifteen.
  • So if it was a large deduction, you had a longer period to take that benefit. And if you were a farmer or a rancher making fifty-one percent of your income from agriculture, you got to take a hundred percent of your adjusted gross income until it was diminished. Oh, so if it took you fifty years, you got fifty years.
  • If it took you two, you got two. And we actually did get two easements donated that were very wonderful properties and both of them are contiguous to, to our lands that we control. So it again expanded our habitat and our control. The Warren Ranch was an interesting exercise and one that we're still trying to play out to see how successful we are.
  • The Warren Ranch has been a continuous , a, a cattle ranch that's been in continuous operation since the mid-1800s and there were two parts of the family when Mister Warren, I think it was the second one married Lenore Jordan. Became a farming and a ranching family and the Jordans were always interested in rice farming and the Warrens were always interested in cattle.
  • And as the families got more and more dispersed and more and more grandchildren, then children were born, the part of the family wanted to stay on the ranch, part of the family wanted to leave and sell it for, to the highest bidder. The Warrens wanted to stay, most of the Jordans and the Kruffs wanted to leave.
  • And we tried to work with the family to identify ways that they can actually make income on the ranch and they would be able to see it as more profitable to keep it than to sell it. We did not succeed. We thought about wetlands mitigation, we thought about organic farming. We thought about grassland restoration, lots of ways.
  • But it became clear that there really was different values that the two sides of family had. But in 2003, one member of the family, who was direct descendant of the Warrens, decided she'd had it. She really felt that it was a very fractious, family dynamic and she wanted out and she wanted to sell.
  • But the Warrens couldn't buy her out and she didn't want to sell it to the Jordans and the Kruffs. So her cousins, the Warrens, came to the Conservancy and they'd been working with us, they'd been trying to work with Fish and Wildlife, Nature Conservancy and stuff, and they'd asked us if we would buy her out.
  • Now the interesting thing about buying her out is that all she had was an undivided interest. And most people thought we were crazy to buy an undivided interest because you don't really have control over your own destiny when you buy an undivided interest. You're a member of the family.
  • So we became a member of the family and in 2003, the Jordans and Warrens wrestled control from not only their own thirty-seven percent ownership, they controlled two of the trusts. One trust that was the woman that we had bought from, but she was just a beneficiary of the trust,
  • she wasn't in control of the trust, and another gentleman, who again, wanted to keep the ranch but was only a beneficiary and a lifetime beneficiary at that. So they had a fifty-one percent ownership and what that meant was that if they wanted to, they could sue for partition and anybody who bought it from them could sue for partition.
  • And the importance of that was that it could split up the ranch so that it could be developed and it also meant that someone might like to buy it. So the Conservancy decided to put in a bid and we were just about ready to put in a bid for twenty-five hundred dollars an acre to buy the fifty-one percent.
  • So remember, if we were buying it all, that would be at the new ungodly amount of five thousand an acre for us, maybe even more because there's some discount for undivided interest, when a developer made a bid and put in a serious offer at thirty-three hundred dollars an acre.
  • And a unique aspect of our being a member of the family is that there was a surface ownership agreement. That's probably way more information than you need, but the cool thing about it is, is it meant any member of the family could match an outsiders offer. So we matched it.
  • We could not raise that kind of money, it was ten point eight million dollars because the thirty-three hundred dollars bought the ownership of the ranch and it bought them a twenty-five percent mineral own it, interest. It did not buy the ranching operations, which we had gotten at, as, in our previous sale.
  • And so we got a mortgage on it. And the thing that's been very interesting about it and we're learning as we go forward, as, as we were successful. We do have a mortgage; we could pay it out over twenty years. We're going to hit the fourth payment in June first and it's always a struggle because we don't have a lot of earned income and, and foundations do not like to fund debt.
  • But we're working on releasing acreage for every one point five million dollars we raise and that's helping a little bit. But the, the m, the most interesting thing about it is is that it's a working cattle ranch and the gentleman who's the ranch manager is also a co-owner.
  • And we're finding that its not possible for us to just step back and let him be a ranch manager, that, that we have to be on an oversight committee and we have to kind of divide up the ranch in a sense. And one of the things that were trying to do right now and again, everything's a little late with us sometimes but its to look at the different functions of the ranch and find out where should cattle graze?
  • Where can cattle be kept out because there's beautiful tall grass prairie and then we just go in and we hammer it because we maybe can't do a fire. Or where should there be a fire and want to be away from the houses? And to manage it more intensively in three ways, which may be, in a sense, incompatible.
  • The first is that it, it'd be a very, m, maybe intense is not the word, but at least, a fairly profitable ranch with haying and cattle operations. That we enhance it for its habitat, both vegetative and animal and try to do all the things that we can to spend money,
  • to make it a better place which might ultimately help us with the third issue and that is that we have non-consumptive and consumptive users of the ranch that ultimately become probably the best thing we can do to save the ranch. And that might mean someone who's coming out and hiking on it.
  • It might be a hunter who is hunting quail. It might be someone who's fishing in our lake. It might be someone who wants to bike through the prairie or take a boat, a, a horse ride. It might eventually be having a bed and breakfast there and, and I think the King Ranch and other ranches around Texas have been very successful at managing all those different things.
  • But were kind of babies in that area and so we're trying very gingerly to step out and do different things. And right now, there's a section of the ranch that's kind of split by a road, it's kind of the north section and it's got a lake on it that once was probably beautiful.
  • And one of the things we want to do is to bring that lake back to its former glory. Cost a lot of money to do that, so one of the things were looking at, I mentioned before, well, how great we are for flood control. Well, there are a lot of developments upstream of us that would love us to help detain some of their water.
  • If we could maintain our own conservation ethic and our conservation values, but we can get money to restore that lake or make it even better and maybe even money to help maintain it and operate it and provide visitor facilities around it, like a trail and a visitors center and platforms and piers and maybe even make enough money to help pay off our mortgage, then we're going to do that.
  • Now that, you could say, well, how is that incompatible? Well, it's incompatible if you've got a, a, a ranch manager who wants to have a thousand head of cattle. Where does he put them? Does he have to use that north pasture? And, and we're going slowly but gingerly, moving to explore all of those kinds of things
  • and, for me, what's been so wonderful about this is that I don't think I ever realized when I got, you know, my, my master's degree that what I really like is being a deal maker. And what I really love is doing the land deals, but it's making the deals with the flood control,
  • it's maybe making d, deals with the developers and getting them to do something that fits our ethos and does it better than maybe they'd do it by themselves, but ultimately helps everybody. And I, I hear some developers say wow, having an eighteen thousand acre preserve system that has public access next to our development can only be good for our development.
  • It can only allow us to raise our prices up here. Well, if it does, so be it. We're, we're not trying to stop them. I mean, I could wish that they weren't there, but they are there. So if we can use them, so much the better. But it's also mean, meant that we've had to change our strategy.
  • If truly were going to get to fifty thousand acres, one of the things were now doing is identifying some of the larger landowners in the, on the Katy Prairie and trying to work with them to say we know you love your land. We know your children love your land.
  • What are you thinking about doing? Have you done estate planning? Do you want to save it for your children? Do you want to maybe sell it and make some money, but sell it to a conservation buyer?
  • And somebody who will give them cash, but who values that land, who might even pay ten thousand dollars an acre because they want a place where their kids can run and play without worrying about getting hit by a car because they, you know, they ran out in the street.
  • Or worrying about not letting them, I mean, I know I always was worried about watching my kids every minute because we lived in a very urban environment and I, you know, you have to do that. So, so I think we've become smarter as we've matured as an organization. The question is have we gotten smart enough, fast enough and will we be able to save it? (misc.)
  • DT: Mary Anne, you've worked for a very urban land trust, park proponent, the Friends of Hermann Park. You've also worked for this exurban, rural, in many cases, land trust, the Katy Prairie Conservancy.
  • And you've brought these talents and experiences together as a founder and a past chair of a group called the Texas Land Trust Council, sort of a partnership, a federation of more than thirty land trusts across the state. I was wondering if you could tell me what you see reflected in these other land trust experiences and what you tried to cobble together there.
  • MAP: Right. Well, I wish I could say I were a founder. My predecessor was one of the find, founding members, but I was definitely an early member and I was on the board for a long time and a past chair. I think what's been so interesting about the land trust council, which is basically a service organization for land trusts in Texas, is the membership of the land trust community;
  • the, the land trusts themselves bring community values to the front. The reason that they do what they do is because something about their community has value and they found enough people who want to save it. So you might have the Pines and Prairies Land Trust, which is saving pines and prairies.
  • Or you have the Native Prairies Association, which is just statewide and really, really cares about finding every last piece of prairie they can and figuring out a way to save it. But you also have people that are looking at, I'm never going to say this right, but it's the rock formations. The (?) (inaudible)
  • MAP: Yes. And they are they are, they're, they care about sort of ideological and historical treasures. And they bring together groups of people to try to work together to preserve what they believe is important in their community.
  • And what's so interesting when you're in a small town, and I, I sometimes forget this because, you know, our office is in, we've got a Houston office and a Waller office and I sometimes think that we haven't done a good enough job of, of sort of what's the word, kind of embracing that small town thing, being out there because so much gets done there.
  • But the, the smaller land trusts, they bemoan the fact that they don't have Brown Foundations and Houston Endowments and Exxons and Mobil and, and Conoco Phillips to fund them. On the other hand, they've got a wealth of, of expertise in their community and they've got lots of hands who want to work on it
  • and they've got the ability to plant a small enough venue that they really can wrap their arms around it. But often they have the same problems that the big ones have. It's, it is, you know, finding money. It's, it's timing. You know, when an opportunity comes up, can they put together the package fast enough to save that particular property?
  • It's cultivating people and that takes a long time. There's a lot of, I think, mistrust sometimes, especially when I come in with my sort of New England accent and I'm talking to farmers and ranchers who are out in Katy and who probably, you know, are standing there, thinking who is she? What does she want?
  • And that happens all over this state. You know, why are you talking to me about my land? What do you know about my land? And I think that sometimes we all have to step back a little and realize that most of those people have been on the land for many, many years and they have a passion about it and they're knowledgeable about it.
  • And you have to, you have to really find out what's important to them, whether or not, you know, it's the money, whether or not it's the culture, whether or not it, it is conservation of their land, passing it down to their children. In all of the land trust community, we have that same thing and we sometimes get so focused on ooh, we're saving this, we're doing this, that we forget that we need partners.
  • We need a lot of partners. You know, it's the Rotary Clubs, it's the Chambers of Commerce, it's the, it's the, the engineer down the street. And it's harder when you're in an urban one because even though you have more people like that, they've all got a lot of interests, whereas in, in a smaller community, sometimes you can find a lot of people.
  • I think a land trust community itself has a lot of issues right now. We're, there have been some parts of the country in which, because people have embraced this conservation ethic and gotten benefit from it financially, maybe some corners were cut, maybe some things were done that maybe, probably weren't done as carefully as they would.
  • Not done wrong, just done maybe too quickly and not enough documentation. And so now were all with land trusts, looking back and saying should we be having better standards and practices? Should we be having better records? That's good.
  • We're growing up. We're maturing as organizations. And the Texas Land Trust Council is helping us do that by bringing in the Excellence Program for these guided assessments to say where are we lacking? Where are we doing good? Or where are we doing well, excuse me. Those kinds of things. (misc.)