Tuesday night, the Fillmore County Board of Commissioners voted to allow the DNR to acquire most of the land in the Larson Family Trust under a compromise that keeps 42 acres of tillable land under production, according to the Trust For Public Land's Minnesota State Office Senior Project Manager Robert McGillivray.
As Bluestem noted in Anti-public land movement: Fillmore Co board turned down land owners' request to sell to DNR, the owners originally wished to see the DNR acquire 379 acres.
In a phone interview, McGillivray told Bluestem that some of the excluded 42 acres are highly erodible land (a little less than half).*
We learned of the compromise via Gretchen Mensink Lovejoy's article in the Fillmore County News Leader, Commissioners come to agreement with DNR on land acquisition. Lovejoy reports:
Fillmore County commissioners entertained a return visit from Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) representative Mike Tenney and Robert McGillivray, of The Trust for Public Land, during the meeting on Tuesday, Jan. 23.
Tenney and McGillivray had come before the board during previous meetings to ask for the commissioners’ blessing for the acquisition of 337 acres from a land trust, the Larson Family Trust, to be added to the Choice Wildlife Management Area near Mabel.
During those previous meetings, the pair had been turned down with commissioners expressing reservations related to the balance of available farmland and the board’s somewhat frustrated perspective of the DNR’s management of land that had already been acquired.
The board came to a compromise with the DNR and Trust for Public Land, but Board Chair Mitch Lentz voted in opposition.
Following the vote, Commissioner Randy Dahl registered his concerns and appreciation. “Going forward, I very much appreciate your cooperation…I have concerns about the amount of land being bought.”
It's good to see most of the land going to the gem that is the Choice WMA. For more on it, check out the Post Bulletin's John Weiss write up in 2016's New WMA offers 1,050 acres of possibilities and the description of the conservation efforts on the Nature Conservancy's website.
*Bluestem has corrected an earlier version of this part of the post. We regret the error.
Photo: Vesta Creek in the Choice WMA. TNC website.
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