Photo: Brian Wilcox
March 18, 2024
HVA and Regional Conservation and Greenprint Director Tim Abbott are featured in this article from The Berkshire Eagle by Jane Kaufman.
“‘This worked, because of both luck and planning,’ said Tim Abbott, conservation director with the Housatonic Valley Association based in Cornwall Bridge, Conn. ‘The luck was that the Realtor [Elyse Harney Morris] who was engaged by Mr. Boyett understood how conservation transactions could help him meet his goals and also satisfying his sense of having been a good steward of the land for the decades that he had owned it.’
That meant that the Aragis needed to get financing up front and purchase the farmland outright, as well as the Trustees of Reservations to do the same to expand Bartholomew’s Cobble.
To buy time in the Connecticut transactions, ‘It required two limited liability corporations to form out of nothing,’ Abbott said. ‘People who are willing to put millions of dollars of capital on the line to buy and hold it and give time to the conservation groups to go through the various processes of applying for grants. Without that, we wouldn’t have done it.’
Abbott recruited those funders whom he described as altruistic, because they may never see their full investment returned….”
Read more here.
Quote taken from The Berkshire Eagle website: https://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/southern_berkshires/in-a-carefully-orchestrated-effort-one-farmer-and-eight-conservation-organizations-are-preserving-1100-acres-in-sheffield-and-northwest-connecticut/article_7b947392-e0af-11ee-8aec-4722e79a7c22.html
