County Commissioner Dan Huls is intimately acquainted with the history of the Open Lands Program in Ravalli County. In 1999 Huls was operating his family’s dairy farm in Corvallis, and was also serving as president of the county planning board. The commissioners wanted help with agriculture issues – they’d been receiving complaints about some of the agricultural practices, such as smoke when farmers burned their irrigation ditches in the spring, spotlights at night during calving season, etc. They needed help in responding, according to Huls.
“They asked us to put together a meeting and we ended up forming a committee which later became the advisory board called the Right to Farm & Ranch Board,” said Huls, a committee that would support the agricultural industry in the valley.
He said the committee, which he served on, first educated themselves about what other ag counties were doing. They learned about the successful bond program in fast-growing Gallatin County, where they were able to use that tool to protect some critical open space for the benefit of the agriculture industry and the public. “That planted the seed,” said Huls, of what eventually became the Open Lands Bond Program in Ravalli County. “We kept working on that and in 2005 we formalized a proposal.” It went before the planning board for a recommendation which was then sent to the county commissioners who agreed to place the issue before the voters. Voters approved a $10 million bond to be used to basically purchase the development rights from private landowners in order to preserve open space, as well as agriculture. The bond program is now up for renewal for the first time and will be on the November ballot. The tax impact varies and people should look at the “taxable value” on their tax bill to see how they would be affected. According to the website yestoravallicountyopenlands.org, the average residential property in Ravalli County would pay about $21 per year for the program. And since it’s a bond, and not a permanent levy, it requires voter approval whenever it’s up for renewal.
Huls said prior to the passage of the first bond, they went to every community and met with fire departments, civic groups, “and just about everybody we could talk to. At that time the tax impact was less than a latte a day,” said Huls, and now the impact would be even less. Their hard work paid off and the bond garnered nearly 60% of the vote in 2006.
Now, 16 years later, members of the Ravalli County Right to Farm & Ranch Board and other proponents of the bond program are out and about in the community again, trying to educate the public about the benefits of the program. The Star met with Alan Maki, chair of the Right to Farm & Ranch Board, Dan Severson, a ranch owner in the Burnt Fork area east of Stevensville who put 354 acres of his property into a conservation easement in 2011, Bev Schneider, president of the Stevensville United Methodist Women, who is organizing a public meeting on the bond program to help get accurate information out to the community, and Huls, who describes himself as “the historian” of the group.
According to Maki, about $7 million of the original $10 million has been spent, with enough applications in the hopper now to exhaust the remaining funds. The first easement created with the funds was the Wood Family Ranch between Stevensville and Corvallis in 2009. Since then, there have been 39 conservation projects completed, from Sula to north of Stevensville.
Many of these projects preserve prime agricultural land, the huge green swaths of hay ground and cow pastures that you see in the valley’s bottomland. Many of these places are irrigated by water from the complex irrigation system installed in the early 1900s. According to Maki, it’s the farmers and ranchers that maintain that system, keeping the valley beautiful for all of us to enjoy.
As more people move into the valley, drawn here by the beauty and open space, the greater the potential for more subdivisions which carve up the large acreages into smaller and smaller pieces in order to build homes, affecting control of weeds, water and air quality, wildlife habitat and public access.
“Generally, I don’t think people realize that farmers and ranchers make the commitment to take care of the land and to make a living on it,” said Maki. “This program recognizes the sacrifice that these people make.”
Schneider said she moved here from New Jersey “because it was just developing too fast there.” She said she appreciates the open space here in the Bitterroot.
“But we’re certainly not anti-development,” said Severson. He said that it took his family several years to finally decide to place their land in a conservation easement. “These commitments are forever. Our decision had to do with our parents and grandparents. We could see that someday our land would be subdivided. When the voters passed the bond, letting us know they were willing to put $5 out of their own pockets to save open space, that made a difference for us.”
After Severson protected his own land, he started talking with neighboring landowners about the program. “We talked about it as a community, how neat it would be to preserve the Burnt Fork valley. I’m very fortunate that we had neighbors that wanted to participate. It’s still going on.”
The program snowballed in the Burnt Fork drainage, with more than a dozen easements now in place, many of them contiguous, creating a corridor of land that will remain as open space forever.
“Fifty years from now people are going to look back and say, wow, look at what they did,” said Severson. “These people work their tails off to make sure this money is used wisely. It’s all thanks to the wise people in 2006. It just makes you feel good to know that your friends and neighbors see the value of this.”
Maki said there are about 370,000 acres of private land in Ravalli County. Of that, about 10,000 acres have been preserved. He calculated that, if the 10,000 acres were valued at $15,000 each, that would total $150 million. “So, we protected $150 million worth of land for only $7 million. This is about taking a few of our nicest pieces and making the whole valley a nicer place for the rest of the people on the other 360,000 acres,” said Maki. “These are all gifts to the community from the landowners. They wanted to do that for the public benefit and also for their own legacy.”
Maki said the non-profit Bitter Root Land Trust (BRLT) is the third party entity that works with Ravalli County on the Open Lands Bond Program. The BRLT brings together the interested landowners and the county, and also finds other funders to help make these projects happen. This helps to stretch the tax dollars as far as they can go. Funding has come from such varied sources as the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Natural Resource Conservation Service and the Farm Bill. The match from outside sources is about $3 to every $1 of OLBP money.
Not all the money in the Open Lands Bond Program goes to preserve ag land. Some has been used to create parks, like 70 acres in Skalkaho Bend Park along the river in Hamilton, or the C. Ben White Memorial Fishing Access Site on the river south of Darby. Another big chunk, the 1080-acre Lazy J Cross Ranch near Sula, allows public hunting access through Montana’s Block Management Program. Every proposal is thoroughly analyzed for its overall value to the public. The county commissioners make the final decision on each proposal.
Eddie Olwell, a flyfishing outfitter based in Stevensville, said the economic impact of the Open Lands Bond Program on the local economy is significant. “I think a lot of people think the Open Lands Bond Program is just about open space and agriculture,” said Olwell, who has operated his business Fishs Eddy O for the past 23 years. “But the Open Lands Bond Program has also protected over 40 miles of river and stream habitat in the Bitterroot watershed that is the lifeblood of our valley. It also benefits access for anglers. For example, the C. Ben White Fishing Access on the West Fork preserved 100 acres of riparian land, and also connects thousands of acres of national forest land. Without the Open Lands Bond Program, that access would likely have been lost.”
“Not only is fishing and hunting part of our culture and lifestyle,” added Olwell, “it’s the reason people move here, the clean rivers and blue ribbon trout streams. And non-resident anglers spend over $30 million to recreate on the Bitterroot River. This money has an impact on most of our Main Street businesses. Please vote yes to preserve the qualities that make the Bitterroot Valley such a great place to live.”
“In a high growth area, a conservation easement is forever but so is dividing the ground and breaking it up,” said Maki. “That’s forever too. Those are the two forever choices we have.”
Maki, Olwell and Huls will be the featured panelists at a public information meeting on the ballot measure on Wednesday, October 12th at 7 p.m. at the fellowship hall of the Stevensville United Methodist Church, corner of 3rd and College Streets. The UMC Women and Men are hosting the meeting, which will include the speakers panel, a short film and a time for questions and answers. Refreshments will be served. Schneider encourages everyone to come and learn more about the ballot measure.
“If this doesn’t pass it would take away a tool that helps property owners conserve their land for the public and the future – the last open space in the county,” said Maki. “Sometimes you don’t know what you have until you lose it.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated from its original version to correct the spelling of Beverly Schneider’s name. Some additional facts have been added as well.