by ken hill » Jun 2, 2006 7:58 am
This is a reply (in part) rec'd from the atty that helped us at the time of the last effort to get the conservation easement as well as purchase two CDS properties. I am posting this so the reader who may be unacquainted with the topic has a general understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.
(T)he general idea; the grantee (recipient) of the easement rights has to be independent of the NSS and should not be a subsidiary of the NSS. Likewise, I would not even suggest that we use the NACD because there is a significant risk that in the event of an accident and resulting litigation it is conceivable that all of the NSS/NSS-CDS and NACD could be named as defendants, e.g. NSS is named because it owns the land; the CDS is named because it operates the guide system and the NACD could be named because some of the people involved in the accident could arguably be operating as representatives of, or somehow in the furtherance of NACD activities, e.g. joint NSS-CDS and NACD trash clean-up or scientific dives or (I know training is supposed to be prohibited there) some NACD instructor does take a student into the sink and something goes wrong. My point is the recipient of the easement should be someone who is very remote to the NSS and
I think some type of non-profit nature conservancy unassociated with diving would be better and I think we need to make the easement rights unusable to be terminated by the holder of those rights and restrict their transferability except to another non-profit conservancy type organization and then only with consent of the owner of the property. On the other hand, we would have to carefully reserve the right to access the sink on an on going basis to dive and allow for the construction and maintenance of the cat walk, notwithstanding the arguably adverse impact that might have on the natural state of the sink.
The goal is to preserve the sink and the cave system for its intended use. As a by product a strict easement makes the land value diminish in favor of the conservation ethic. The atty does not think that we will be able to get this done prior to any zoning hearing for WalMart because of the complexity of the task. We can however go in with the statement that we are going to do it etc....
Thanks to all who emailed me re: "the NSS way of doing things." It is within the chain of command and I wish them well running with it. I will help where and how I can. /K