Advocates Alert 11/14/2007: Senate Farm Bill Debate Starts: House Passes One-Year Conservation Easement Extension

As the Congress nears the end of the year, the action is fast and furious – and confusing! So this message is longer than usual—but stick with us! Now is a critical time for our conservation community’s legislative issues, especially the farm bill, and extending the tax incentives for conservation.

Farm Bill

Update:

The farm bill is in front of the full Senate. It includes many of the policy changes land trusts wanted to see in the Natural Resources Conservation Service's conservation easement programs for working ag lands. But the funding levels for those programs are much smaller than those approved by the House earlier this year. We need your help now to increase this funding.

The Senate bill gives the Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (renamed the Farmland Protection Program (FPP) in the Senate bill, but still applicable to ranch and pasture as well as farmland) $485 million over five years and gives the Grassland Reserve Program (GRP) $240 million. The House bill, passed in July, provided much more -- $995 million for FPP and $330 million for GRP.

Call to Action:

Please call your Senators this week and ask them to support adding more funds to the Farmland Protection Program and Grassland Reserve Program, to protect valuable farm and range land from being lost to development. There are currently two amendments which would increase funding for FPP and GRP. Please ask each of your Senators to co-sponsor these amendments:

1. The Dorgan-Grassley amendment offered by Senators Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Charles Grassley (R-IA), will limit the maximum amount of farm program payments to any individual. That frees up funds to be added to a number of programs, including FPP and GRP.

2. The Brown-Sununu amendment offered by Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and John Sununu (R-NH), will cut the subsidy given to companies that offer crop insurance to farmers. Because crop prices have risen, the insurers are selling more dollars of insurance, but the same number of policies. Under the existing law, they would get twice as much money for selling the same number of policies. The savings from this amendment would go to a variety of programs, including FPP and GRP.

Please ask your Senators to support these two amendments, because conserving working farm and ranchlands and open grasslands is important to your community and state. If you are hoping to get an FPP or GRP grant (both programs give grants to land trusts to purchase conservation easements), these amendments will help ensure that adequate funding is there for your projects!

The Senate switchboard is (202) 224-3121, and they can connect you to any Senate office. Once online with your Senator's office, ask to speak to their natural resources or agriculture aide. The Senate is about to take a two week recess from votes – but their staff will be at work, and available to take your calls. The Senate is likely to vote on these amendments the first week of December!

Tax Incentive for Conservation Easements

Update:

The Senate farm bill includes the tax provisions passed by the Finance Committee several weeks ago – making the conservation easement tax incentive passed in 2006 permanent*. That provision seem to be in good shape, though (as we mention above) we don't know when the Senate will actually pass the bill.

On November 9th, the House passed a one-year extension of the conservation easement incentive, as part of a much bigger bill to extend a variety of expiring tax laws and an expensive provision to prevent more people from having to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax. The Senate won't just pass this – it was passed on a party line vote in the House, and there is significant resistance to a number of the elements of this bill in the Senate -- so much resistance that there is a real question whether the Senate will take action to extend expiring provisions now, or let it slide into next year.

Sooner or later, the House and Senate tax committees will sit down together, either on the farm bill or on an extenders bill, to address whether to extend the conservation easement incentive for one year, or permanently. It could still happen this year, though the odds are growing that it may slip into February or March.

In either case, we still have time to help persuade House leaders to make the conservation easement incentive permanent!

Call to Action:

If your Representative has not cosponsored HR 1576: Please ask them to now! Every additional cosponsor is another argument for House leaders to make the easement incentive permanent! See http://www.lta.org/publicpolicy/tax_incentives_cosponsors.htm for a list of House cosponsors.

If your Representative is already a cosponsor of HR 1576: Please ask them to write or call Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rangel (D-NY) or Ranking Member Jim McCrery (R-LA) now, to specifically ask them to make the easement incentive permanent, so that donors can carefully consider their conservation easement gift without the pressure of an impending deadline.

Learn more about the Federal Tax Benefits at http://conserveland.org/pp/fedtax/index

Source: Land Trust Alliancewebmaster@conserveland.org