Reprinted from The Day newspaper; published 12/13/2009, written by Jenna Cho.
Dec 13, 2009 2:30 PM -
Lyme - When the Platners purchased their house on Selden Road in 2007, they customized the property, landscaping a portion of the 18.75 acres of land on which the house sits.
But whether aesthetic changes are even allowed at 66 Selden Road is now a question before the courts.
That's because in 1981, original owner Paul Selden placed a conservation easement on a good portion of the property. The Lyme Land Conservation Trust, which oversees the easement, is at odds with the Platners over what exactly the easement says the Platners can and cannot do with their land.
The land trust in October took the issue to court, requesting that the court make a declaratory judgment on whether or not the easement allows landscaping on the protected land.
"When we noticed the new owners - the Platners - were treating (the property) differently, we tried very, very hard to strike up a dialogue with them, but really, we were rebuffed at every turn," land trust President George Moore said on Thursday. "We have a fiduciary responsibility and the duty to protect the wishes of Paul Selden. If we were to turn a blind eye and not do our duty, I don't think anybody would ever trust us again."
Beverly Platner could not be reached for comment Thursday. Her attorney, New London-based Santa Mendoza, said only that the document in dispute is a "declaration of restrictions," not a conservation easement.
The Lyme community, where about 40 percent of the land is open space, takes its land-conservation issues seriously. The land trust has about 500 members, and the town itself aims to set aside about $50,000 a year for future town purchases of open-space land.
This is the 43-year-old land trust's first lawsuit, said attorney Frederick "Fritz" Gahagan, who is representing the land trust. While the group, which is responsible for 87 properties encompassing 2,600 acres, has had disagreements with property owners in the past, none have resulted in legal action until now.
"The question is, does the easement limit human management of the protected areas to wildlife habitat and agricultural uses?" Gahagan said. "Or does it allow a broader range of management, including for landscaping purposes?"
As protected properties are transferred from original owner to new owner, more and more land trusts across the country are seeing differences in opinion on what the original conservation effort meant, Moore said.
"As you get further away from the original donor who was motivated by strong conservation beliefs to protect his or her land, we're finding nationwide that as a second and third owner buy the property, that they may not share those same beliefs," Moore said.
Leslie Ratley-Beach, conservation defense director for the national conservation group Land Trust Alliance, said one of the trends the group is seeing in land conservation issues is successor owners who "don't see eye-to-eye with the original land trust's intentions."
Most differences are rectified voluntarily or through mediation, but some do lead to legal action, Ratley-Beach said.
"It's not land trusts being litigious, it's land trusts doing their job to uphold conservation easements," she said.
Conservation easements became popular land-preservation tools in the 1970s, Ratley-Beach said. What may be contributing to the differing interpretations on Paul Selden's conservation easement is the fact that it was one of the first the Lyme Land Trust developed, and the language is not as precise as an easement would be today.