Conservation Easement Fraud in VA

Shakeup at Virginia land trust makes waves Posted on April 12, 2015 Written by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D., cfact.org

Now the fox is in charge of the henhouse!

The abrupt depar­ture of a high-ranking offi­cial from the Pied­mont Envi­ron­men­tal Coun­cil (PEC) is fuel­ing spec­u­la­tion that the con­tro­ver­sial land trust is feel­ing the heat from rev­e­la­tions of its trans­gres­sions against a Vir­ginia farmer.

Heather Richards joined the PEC in Sep­tem­ber 2006, ini­tially serv­ing as direc­tor of land con­ser­va­tion and, from Sep­tem­ber 2011 to April 2015, as vice pres­i­dent for con­ser­va­tion and rural pro­grams.  Richards achieved national noto­ri­ety when a video was posted on the Inter­net show­ing her in an angry con­fronta­tion with farmer Martha Boneta.  The PEC offi­cial was on Boneta’s farm to carry out an inspec­tion in con­nec­tion with a con­ser­va­tion ease­ment the land trust co-holds on the prop­erty.   In the video, Richards demands to see the con­tents of a closet in the farm’s barn. Boneta, stand­ing her ground, refuses the demand, point­ing out that the closet and its con­tents have noth­ing to do with the con­ser­va­tion easement.

Bait and Switch Con­ser­va­tion Easement

The video has since come to sym­bol­ize the intru­sive, police-state tac­tics the PEC used in mon­i­tor­ing Boneta’s com­pli­ance with the terms of the con­ser­va­tion ease­ment.  It has since been learned that the con­ser­va­tion ease­ment that Boneta jointly signed with the PEC on pur­chas­ing the farm in 2006 is not the ease­ment the PEC filed with Fauquier County.  As a result of this bait and switch, Richards was on Boneta’s land enforc­ing a con­ser­va­tion ease­ment that the farmer had nei­ther seen nor signed.

Fur­ther under­min­ing the posi­tion of the PEC were dis­clo­sures that the land trust attempted to have sur­veil­lance cam­eras installed on Boneta’s prop­erty and that the War­ren­ton, Vir­ginia, based orga­ni­za­tion had falsely claimed that Con­fed­er­ate Gen­eral Stonewall Jack­son had encamped on what is now her prop­erty on his way to the first Bat­tle of Bull Run in June 1861.

With its rep­u­ta­tion in tat­ters, the PEC has now shed the pub­lic face of the land trust’s abuse of Boneta.  At the begin­ning of April, Richards’ name and photo were qui­etly removed from the PEC’s web­site.  Her depar­ture is a tacit acknowl­edge­ment by the PEC that pub­lic expo­sure of its treat­ment of Boneta had so severely dam­aged the orga­ni­za­tion that a head needed to roll.

Chair of the Land Trust Accred­i­ta­tion Commission

Heather Richards’ 8–1/2-year stay at the PEC may have ended unhap­pily, but she still is a force to be reck­oned with in the land-trust uni­verse.  Since the begin­ning of the year, Richards has been serv­ing as chair of the Land Trust Accred­i­ta­tion Com­mis­sion, a project of the Land Trust Alliance. As of Feb­ru­ary 25, 2015, the Com­mis­sion had accred­ited 301 land trusts in 45 states and ter­ri­to­ries.  Richards’ for­mer affil­i­a­tion, the PEC, is one of those accred­ited land trusts.  Asked in an inter­view posted on the www.landtrustaccreditation.org web­site if she could tell a land trust only one thing about the com­mis­sion, Richards responded as follows:

We’re just like you, and we have to live by these rules, too.  Because we are pro­fes­sion­als who have to work in this field for accred­ited land trusts, we under­stand what an accred­i­ta­tion process means to a land trust.  Because we are you.

In say­ing “we’re just like you,” Richards may have revealed more than she real­ized.  Just how sim­i­lar to the PEC, Richards’ for­mer employer, are the other land trusts the com­mis­sion has accred­ited?   Are we to believe that the PEC is the only land trust to have abused its power?  As they grow in num­ber and power, and increase the amount of pri­vate land they con­trol, land trusts should be sub­jected to the same level of scrutiny that uncov­ered the mis­deeds of the PEC.

In a bizarre twist to the tale, Richards says in another inter­view on landtrustaccreditation.org that she was “[b]orn and raised in Toronto, Canada.”  But in response to the next ques­tion, she says “I was born and raised in north­west­ern New Jer­sey, 45 miles out­side of New York City.”  While her place of birth may remain a mys­tery, her place in the recent his­tory of the Pied­mont Envi­ron­men­tal Coun­cil is no secret.

“Fox in the Hen House”

“Hav­ing Heather Richards chair the Land Trust Accred­i­ta­tion Com­mis­sion is putting the fox in charge of the hen house,” says Martha Boneta.

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  Filed Under: Corporatism/Fascism, Property Rights, Public-Private Partnerships, Sustainability, Wildlands Network
   
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