With its rows of golden corn and deep green soybeans leading to a big red barn, Bur Oaks Farm in Webster Township is a picture-perfect farm.
“Crops this year are generally excellent,” emails Tom Bloomer, who bought the 160 acres with his wife, Rosanne, in 1982. They raised hogs at first, but for the past fifteen years have specialized in popcorn and food-grade soybeans, which they process and package on-site and sell in stores and online.
When the Bloomers retire, other farmers may grow other crops here–but Bur Oaks Farm will never be a subdivision. The Bloomers sold their farm’s “development rights” to the city of Ann Arbor in 2005 for $2.11 million, less 10 percent they donated back to the city.
That sale was the first of many. Today 4,334 acres around the city–nearly seven square miles–are protected as part of the Ann Arbor Greenbelt. Financed by a city tax, grants, and funds from neighboring townships, the program now seems beloved by most residents and politicians. Two prominent exceptions are city councilmember Jane Lumm, who voted against its expansion in 2011, and home builder Craig Welch, who dismisses it as a dubious “farm subsidy program.”
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It wasn’t always so widely supported.
“In ’98 there was a big campaign for countywide purchase of development rights,” recalls Dan Ezekiel, a local science teacher who worked on the campaign. “We got annihilated. Developers poured money in against it, and we were buried.”
“The real estate boom was huge in Washtenaw County in the Eighties and Nineties, and according to polls most people thought sprawl was the number-one issue,” remembers Mike Garfield, the Ecology Center’s director and an organizer of that first campaign. But “buying the development rights on land you don’t own was an unusual new idea, and the home builders fought us on it, and we didn’t fight back, so their argument was believed.”
The defeat didn’t deter the Greenbelt’s supporters.
“We learned a lot of lessons,” says Ezekiel. “Like that the proposal lost in the county but passed in Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor Township.”
“People recognized that it wouldn’t happen at a countywide level,” says Bloomer. “It works at a municipal level. And we learned how to present our ideas better.”
“The city already had a parks millage,” recalls Garfield, “and we wondered if we could turn it into a parks and greenbelt millage, with part of it still used for parks in Ann Arbor but the bulk used for acquiring development rights on land outside Ann Arbor.”
“It took John Hieftje a long time to agree that it was viable,” recall then-councilmember Bob Johnson. “But when it was clear there was a real push, he became a strong advocate.” Other leaders of the 2003 effort were Sierra Club chair Doug Cowherd and McKinley Properties CEO Albert Berriz.
“Mike Garfield and Mayor Hieftje came to see me,” explains Berriz. “I’m usually very pragmatic when you’re talking about taxing people’s homes, but it was a no-brainer … we were getting a lot of resistance from the real estate community, and I was a voice that said tract housing isn’t the only possible outcome for green fields.”
Craig Welch, CEO of Wexford Homes, was the public face of the opposition in both 1998 and 2003. In Welch’s view there are two things wrong with the Greenbelt: “One, it’s not a good use of the public purse to purchase land to benefit just one person: the farmer. Two, it was sold as a way to control land development, but buying the development rights on one farm doesn’t stop the land next door from being sold.”
“The developers fought it ferociously, but we were ready for them,” recalls Ezekiel. “We campaigned like we were on fire. We had 600 volunteers, and we blanketed the city with lawn signs.”
Ann Arbor voters approved the thirty-year tax by a two-to-one margin. Ann Arbor Township passed its own preservation millage the same year, and Scio and Webster townships soon followed.
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Ezekiel, Johnson, and Berriz were all members of the first Greenbelt Commission, with Garfield as chair. They contracted with the Conservation Fund, a national organization that works on land preservation with government and other groups, to provide the staff.
“When Ann Arbor started, nobody had the field expertise that the Conservation Fund brought to the table–how to work with farmers and easements and so on,” the Fund’s Peg Kohring recalls. “The millage was really anti-sprawl, but I thought we could do more with the farming community. In looking at the rich farmland around Ann Arbor, I thought that the Ann Arbor Greenbelt could also become an economic tool to keep productive agricultural land in agricultural production. And the people in Ann Arbor were very open to that.”
“The first goal of our strategic plan was to preserve five big contiguous plots of farmland around the periphery of Ann Arbor, with the ultimate goal of preserving seven to ten thousand acres around Ann Arbor,” Ezekiel recalls. But with land prices rising, they didn’t see how to do that as quickly as they wanted to with just the $2 million or so a year the tax would raise. So the city pledged the future millage revenue as collateral to issue $20 million in bonds.
“We thought that in 2020 or 2030 there’d not be many good opportunities left,” Ezekiel explains. “Interest [rates were] low at the time, and we thought land prices can only get higher, so we wanted to get the maximum amount of farmland preserved and kept in private hands.”
When farmers applied to the program, their land was appraised to determine its value if it remained in agriculture, and its value for residential development. “We were paid the theoretical difference,” says Bloomer. “Land values were hot then, and the difference between farmland and development rights was big.”
For $1.9 million, after their own contribution, the Bloomers agreed to “extinguish our development rights,” he says. “We can no longer subdivide or develop the property for any purpose but agriculture. We can’t even split it into smaller farms.” He and his wife have no children, but even their heirs can only sell the farm “to someone who wants to farm it. But whatever happens, it will still be a natural place. It can go back to trees, but it can’t be developed.”
“People have generally done three things with the money,” says Kohring. “They buy more farmland, they pay down debt, and they pass down the farm to the next generation.”
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The Greenbelt currently includes forty-three farms in eight neighboring townships, as well as four parcels purchased jointly by the city and Washtenaw County’s Natural Area Preservation Program. Altogether the city has spent $27 million, including federal grants, and the county $8 million.
Ann Arbor’s millage costs the average taxpayer about $100 a year, and the Greenbelt’s share of the proceeds is about $2 million a year. About $1.2 million of that goes to bond payments.
“The bond money has been spent,” emails the Conservation Fund’s Ginny Trocchio, who succeeded Kohring as the program’s director. But the Greenbelt fund still has about $9.4 million in it–money from the millage that accumulated while the borrowed money was being spent. “Once the current fund balance has been spent,” Trocchio writes, “there will be on average $800,000 to $1,000,000 to spend on an annual basis.” The separate millages in Ann Arbor, Scio, and Webster townships raise about another $1.1 million a year.
“An effort has always been made to leverage funds from other sources,” says Catherine Riseng, the Greenbelt Commission’s current board chair. Riseng says the program is funded “about 50 percent from the feds or land preservation groups or other townships and 50 percent from Greenbelt funds.”
“We have strict requirements for matching funds,” says Trocchio. “It can never be 100 percent city funds. And for every purchase, we set aside money for monitoring for violations. We’ve never found any, but in land trusts you see it only in the third or fourth generation–maybe.”
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The Greenbelt was able to buy so much land so quickly in large part because something unexpected happened to real estate values: the Great Recession.
“When we passed [the millage], land development rights were going through the roof,” remembers Bob Johnson. “We thought that would go on forever–that’s why we tried to buy so much in the beginning–but exactly the opposite happened.”
“In 2005 we paid around $16,000 per acre [for development rights],” says Trocchio. “But they fell during the recession, and last year was the lowest yet, around $3,000 per acre.” While the decrease in property values has meant some decrease in millage revenue, the huge increase in buying power has put the Greenbelt well on the way to the ultimate goal of 7,000-10,000 acres by 2033.
It also means that the farmers who sold their development rights nine years ago made five times more money than those selling now. But the Greenbelt has continued to find willing sellers. And for most of its early advocates, it’s already a resounding success.
“We’ve preserved a lot of land,” says Tom Bloomer–and also “affording people the opportunity to buy land for fresh food operations, because the sale of the development rights lowered the cost of the farm.” After Ann Arbor Township led a $324,000 purchase of development rights to sixty-four acres on Nixon Rd., for instance, Jill and Nate Lada were able to buy the land for just over $200,000. It’s now their Green Things produce farm.
Garfield says for him “what’s most fascinating is how noncontroversial it has become. In the middle of the campaign it was hardball politics. The controversy smoldered after it passed, but after a few deals people stopped coming to [Greenbelt Commission] meetings.
“It’s a whole change in attitude,” continues Garfield. “Like recycling, it was viewed as something only hippies did, and now it’s as mainstream as apple pie. The same thing is happening with locally grown food.”
From her position as the Conservation Fund’s Midwest director, Kohring sees the Greenbelt in a larger context. “It’s been a phenomenal success, and it’s one of the most nationally significant things Ann Arbor has done.”
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One person the Greenbelt hasn’t won over is Craig Welch. “They call it a farm preservation program. but it’s really a farm subsidy program,” he says. “It’s basically an income transfer from the people of Ann Arbor to forty farm families.
“It was supposed to stop sprawl, but it couldn’t, because they couldn’t achieve the results they wanted with the money they had,” Welch adds. “The Greenbelt sits on about 185,000 acres altogether, and right now the Greenbelt has about 4,500 acres. That’s less than 2.5 percent of the total, so there’s still plenty of land left to be purchased. If there’s a demand for development on a particular road, there’s still plenty of land to build on.”
Garfield agrees that the Greenbelt hasn’t stopped development. But, he emails, “We’ve been able to preserve many of the best farm properties and natural areas in the Ann Arbor area … so now that developers are showing interest in the townships again, their options are more limited.”
Stopping sprawl, he adds, was only part of the program’s purpose: there’s also the intrinsic beauty of the land preserved.
“Ann Arbor residents can see the effects of the Greenbelt right now,” he emails. “If you drive north on US-23, you pass by beautiful Ann Arbor Township farms that were proposed for development in the 1990s and 2000s. If you drive east on Geddes, north of Ypsilanti, you pass through the sensational two-mile-long string of protected properties in Superior Township. If you drive toward Dexter, you’re surrounded by preserved farms in Webster Township, including the Bloomer property.
“The programs changed what the area would have looked like, so if we hadn’t had the land preservation programs in place and funded, there would have been a bunch of subdivisions on properties that now produce food.”
