It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
You don't pay taxes on land in current use, but, if you or whomever you sold the land to, wants to build on it, they have to pay the back taxes first. It's a great for conservation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
In this case, the farmer should have talked to a lawyer first. There are ways to set thing up to prevent misuse.
But governments have eminant domain powers. They can always force a purchase if they really want to.
While I'm sure that's happened once or twice and serves as great fodder to get people of a certain ideological bent riled up, for the most part nobody is giving government land that's worth a shit. They're doing it to land that's effectively unusable due to regulation. Like if you own a strip that's a many acre 30ft wide along a steep river bank plus some space for a house (the lot layout could be the result of an old railroad or industrial thing) you gain literally nothing being on the hook for all that and you can't use it. That sort of thing is the typical case in which these sorts of things are invoked. It's more of a "well if you jerks care so much about what I do with it you can have it" type deal than a tax dodge.
It even sprouted a cottage industry of REITs selling investors a product built around it, syndicated conservation easements: https://www.propublica.org/article/syndicated-conservation-e...
There is a huge Bay Area... not sure what to call it - public/private charity? - called the Peninsula Open Space Land Trust, that has a huge amount of donated land in the Silicon Valley, and is a very popular charity with very deep pockets that can buy land to basically turn into parkland.
They have over $300 million in assets and own over 97,000 acres, and have partnerships with quasi-governmental agencys like the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District to administer those lands as parkland.
The idea that noone is doing this is bullshit, and the idea that it is only done as a tax break is also bullshit.
This organization is a leading reason why living in the Bay Area is valuable and isn't complete urban sprawl. I wouldn't be willing to pay Bay Area prices if not for the existance of the land preserved through organizations like this.
I also don't see how this behavior is in the public good, even if the donor has some ulterior motive, governments are free to reject donations
Like for an example with different dynamics, Menard's will say you can't use the building as a hardware store when they sell to build elsewhere. That's a stupid restriction for society to allow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/24/corner-cros...
Central park is way more wild than a playground, which is way more wild than a city street corner.
The Yosemite National Park front country is way more wild than Central Park.
The federally-protected wilderness areas, where it is illegal to use a chainsaw for trail management as that is not sufficiently wild, in the Sierra Nevadas are even more wild, but still have a ton of people, trails etc.
The Brooks Range in Alaska is yet even more wild - no/few trails, take a bush plane in/out, etc.
Allowing a bit more wilderness is always a utility - it doesn't have to be binary wild/not wild (and very little land habitable by humans has ever not been severely influenced by humans)
They are full of wildlife ranging from small rodents to bears.
On land you contractually purchased with the condition that development be blocked indefinitely? Then why sign the contract? If they wanted a time limit, they could have put it in the contract, or not signed the contract.
If it gets zoned as parkland as part of a sale - great! You should be able to make that part of a sale contract. But if the governing body then votes to make it something else a decade later, that should simply be part of how things work.
Old people ossifying things to how they prefer via preventing future generations to freely operate is not how I want a society to run. If anything the older you get the less say in the future you should have.
It gets nuanced - but in general speaking terms this sort of thing should never be forever set in stone because someone alive 100 years ago decided as such via a private contract. Many other ways to go about setting aside areas for conservation.
Even conservation trusts make more sense to me. It’s still private, but they have an incentive to stay receptive to public comment and be a bit flexible. They might swap that 10 acres for another 100 acres somewhere else that creates a 1200 acre contiguous wilderness or what have you in order to stay relevant to contemporary needs while still staying true to the 250 year old mission.
I simply do not think you should be able to dictate (via private means) what happens to a property after you sell it. That’s for the next person who owns it to decide - in accordance with current local zoning and land use guidelines.
That seems to be what was used here. Then the trust sold it for some cash.
What do you think the outcome of this would actually be?
Someone wants to sell land to develop a parkland but they aren't allowed to dictate that it must be a parkland.
So they just don't sell it ever. Now instead of a nice park it's a direlect lot for decades
The answer to this problem isn't "fuck you old people we're taking your land and building data centers"
I see plenty of people here angry when the idea is floated of the US government opening up public land for mining, drilling, etc. You may not be one of them obviously, but how is this different?
Most contracts are legally mandated to have time limits. I think that's a good policy.
In this case an explicit number of years it has to stay a park would probably work better than an attempt at indefinitely defining the land.