What’s inside:
- Message from Marty
- Healthy Land, Healthy Ecosystems – We Saved Land
- Healthy Land, Healthy Community – We Built Trails
- Healthy Land, Healthy You – We Went Outdoors & Encountered Nature
- President’s Message
- Financial Reports
- Thank You!
Message from Executive Director Marty Coleman-Hunt
Today rain is the talk of the office.
Our Lands staff can’t get outside to continue planting the new pollinator garden at Adam Ryan Preserve. Our Trails staff can’t continue roughing in a new trail to South Wolf Creek at Clover Valley Preserve. The normally docile, tiny creek is now a raging torrent. So we all spent time indoors addressing long awaited things like mapping projects and reporting on grants. What glorious days of winter we have!
I have a good feeling about 2016, and for the many land conservation and restoration projects, trail work, and outings planned. This year, we are building on past successes toward a future unimagined by our founders. Last year we celebrated a formidable milestone: a quarter century of land conservation.
The early 1990s development surge led a forward-thinking group of citizens to form a land trust. That early mission was to work with willing, private landowners to set aside properties to remain as open space. The ensuing couple of decades have shown that broader economic cycles drive the pace of development in our community. We’ve seen local government environmental protection standards come and go. The work of our land trust acts as constant, collaborative and durable way to protect our coveted rural quality of life.
As our precious agricultural land came under threat for Roseville-style development, we responded by working with large ranch landowners to stop landscape fragmentation. As our demographics have evolved and recreation has become a critical component of our economic vitality, the lack of a government supported open space district or recreation department has made our mission be of more value. The land trust has responded by developing neighborhood nature preserves and trails. As extreme climate impacts have depleted water resources and degraded our forests we have responded with restoration projects on many of the nearly 10,000 acres of land we have permanently conserved.
We have a lot to be thankful for but especially that we live in a community where people launch grassroots conservation organizations, and donate their money, physical labor and specialized expertise to make sure it successfully delivers the mission. If this is still important to you, please show your ongoing support in 2016: renew your membership, donate to a special appeal, include us in your estate plan or bring a friend to an outing on our lands so we can grow support.
Best wishes for 2016 and I hope to see you on the trail!
~ Executive Director, Marty Coleman-Hunt