 This event or presentation is being taken by the Community Television Network and will be available to watch on Time Warner Cable Channel 5 in the greater Portland area and on demand on their website, which is ctn5.org and we just want to thank CTN. With that, it's my pleasure to introduce Rich Merck, who has come down tonight from Otis Field. He is the president of SWOM, the Small Woodland Owners of Maine. He's seen his fourth year as president. He's almost unprecedented. So for somebody to do this for that long is great. He has developed, I think it would be correct to say, personal interest in succession planning. He owns land in Otis Field. He's got all the problems all of us do. He's got kids. Not really sure. I'll let you tell us. That has nothing to do with the land. So he's developed personal interest and SWOM is basically trying to move forward with this and formalize it. I think we'll be the correct one. He'll tell you about that. And I think it's at least my pleasure to introduce Rich. He is the addition to his fourth year as SWOM president. He's a retired executive with Hancock Lumber. He was their financial guy for a long time. So it's been long and deep in trees. Rich, please. Thank you, Rich. You haven't heard anything yet, so don't climb yet. Brian, is this good? How far can I go, either way? I like that. I like to move around. I passed out an outline of some thoughts about succession planning. And you're welcome to keep them. You're welcome to write on them. But I thought if I gave you the general gist, it would save you time having to write while I talked. My presentations are formal. Only in that I've got an outline and I try to follow it, but they're usually pretty informal. You're welcome to ask questions or comments whenever you want. And because I really do like a pretty informal process. I have found through my conversations with people about succession planning that a lot of us have many of the same issues, many of the same concerns. And so if we get into a conversation and we go off track a little bit, I may try and bring us back on only out of interest for time. But I find that that could be very helpful. I've done all-day workshops on this subject, and I've always found that the people who left with solutions to their succession plans, you typically got to know the people who were in the room that day because we do a lot of talking when we do that. But let me start out with a couple remarks about succession planning, and then I'm going to ask you to give me some information. I consider succession planning to be applicable to not only woodlands or fields or farms, but basically any resources you have in your ownership. To me it's the first phase of a state plan. It's trying to decide what you want to do with what you have. And for younger people that may not seem as interesting or relevant or important as it is to some of us who are older and have put a lifetime into working the land and now want to make sure that that effort is not going to be lost on the next owner because they do something totally different with the land. I don't want to play God or whoever you believe in, but at the same time I've made a big investment in that land and my time and effort, and I want to know that the kinds of things that I think are important to protect the earth are the kinds of things that I need to spend a little bit of time on thinking about what's going to happen. So succession planning to me is the process whereby you decide what you're going to do with your resources. After that, you're probably going to get into a state plan and I'm not going to spend time talking about a state plan. I'm not qualified to. But typically my experience has been you find a good accountant. If you have a lot of resources, you certainly find a good attorney to document in the legal documents such as a will or a trust what needs to be done to set up the plans that you want so that they can be implemented whatever you think it's time to whether it's when you die or whether it's ahead of time or what have you. So succession to planning to me is the first part of a state plan. You're probably going to hear me say it several times tonight. There's a real need to accept the fact that at some point if you're doing serious succession planning and a state planning that you need to develop a team of professionals. Depends on what you're going to do with it. And I'll talk about some of the options you have in a couple minutes. But you need to, as I said, you need to have an accountant. You probably need to have an attorney. You may need to have maybe even a financial advisor. You may need a consulting forester. Some families may need a media to help them deal with the issues, political issues within the family. One of the things I have found that have held up most people back from doing succession planning is the fact that they're concerned about the different interests their children have or the different economic situations that their children are in. Some are very well to do and others don't have a thing. And they're just struggling to get by. And they're saying to me, I don't know how to bring all this together into a place where we can create a family plan. Well, I believe there are resources available. I don't have them. But we'll talk about that a little bit in a minute. So what I want to know from you is why did you come tonight? Besides, the food was great. Whoever brought it, thank you very much. So you folks came because you were told to? No. It was recommended. I was forced. You were forced. We came because we wanted to. Okay. Do you folks have any, did you come with any future goals? I just learned more about the succession planning and just getting myself and my spouse to think a little bit more about that. Okay. Over here, sir? An old fellow told me, and some might know, Kyle Libby's been gone for a while. He told me one day, and I didn't think too much of it at the time, but he says, my bounty has become my burden. That's pretty much what a lot of people are sure about. Bounty is now our burden. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Anything else? Richard? I guess I'm concerned. I used to, as a child, may end up with all the stuff that we have, all the junk. Doesn't seem to be particularly interested in that. At least I haven't deducted it. He's a lawyer, so he should respond to this stuff, but I'm not getting any good vibes from it. Well, that's a mark against them anyway. Yeah. But he's married to a good woman. I know the good woman. She's wonderful. Okay, anything else? Have kids. Have kids. Do they have an interest? We think so. They say they do. Okay. We're going to talk a lot about that. I was lucky. Pardon? I said I was lucky. Oh. Excellent. Excellent, sir. I don't want to speak to my own self-interest, but I will. I'm here as to represent one of those resources you speak to, to get a good estate planning attorney, financial advisor, what have you, so that you don't fail to plan, but that you plan ahead, especially in the younger folks. They have time on their side. But to look at the resources that you have and figure out how best to do as equitable a job as you can in that succession planning, which is the beginning of estate planning. The reason I got involved in a little background, and then I'm going to get off the first page pretty quickly, the reason I got involved in this succession planning a couple of years ago was I was sitting at some meeting. I was there as the president of SWOM. And somebody mentioned a statistic that 45% of all the woodlands, non-industrial owned woodlands in the state of Maine was owned by people, or is owned by people, who were 65 years of age or older. And that over 60% of all the land in Maine that was non-industrially owned was owned by people who were 55 years and older. So it struck a number of us that that was a pretty big exposure when we look at the kind of change of use we've seen with land, particularly in the southern part of the state. But anywhere in the state, along good road arteries or other resources, there's been a lot of change of use. And we got to thinking about this and we thought we need to help these people think about what they want to have happen with their land. And as I got involved in that, I began to, I moved to Maine 35 years ago to become treasurer of Hancock Lumber when it was a little company that did about $7 million a year back in the end of the 70s. And I've seen a lot of change just in that 35 years but I've lived here long enough that I really feel like I'm a manor. So bear me that privilege. And I really want to see us protect the land. I can't remember where I was going to go with that thought so I'll stop. But as I got involved in this and realized that there had been a huge demographic change in the state of Maine, people used to live in the same house together three different generations. Grandparents, parents and children all lived in the same house. A lot of those families worked the land together. A lot of the information that the grandparents knew was transferred through daily activity to the other two generations so that they had the knowledge. Now we're in a circumstance where our children move away. We're not living in the same house. We're not working the land the way we used to in many cases. In many cases you folks are but let me tell you, you're the exception in Maine. A lot of people live in the cities. We don't have the same transfer of knowledge. We don't have the same appreciation for the land. And I suspect, I think, I know it's true with my own children we don't have the same interest in the land. So we decided we'd put together a group of programs like this one. I put together an outline. We're right now, SWOM has just gotten a grant to, we're working with Orno on this with the associate professor Jessica Leahy and her graduate students. We're putting together a handbook on succession planning for people in the state of Maine. When you leave here tonight, I understand that there are a number of organizations that around the country, whether they're farming organizations or forestry organizations or land trusts or state agencies or the milk industry or whatever, they've all put together a lot of great literature and a lot of good input about succession planning. And most of it's available either in PDF format or just on the screens, on your computer. So go on and do searches for land search for a succession planning or what have you. The first page of my outline, you can read it anytime you want to, but the outline basically gives you reasons for why the family landowners are the ones that really matter on preserving our land for the future, particularly as it relates to current uses. When we go back and we look at why do people own woodlands and the same thing could be true of farms, I'm sure. And by the way, I've never seen a farm that didn't have a tree farm on it or didn't have a woodlot somewhere on it, so I kind of consider them all woven together pretty tight. But when we go back and they've done national surveys, the US Forest Service has, and they ask people, why do you own your land? And in the case of woodlots, they don't get to the commercial value or the investment value of the land until item or priority level number seven. It's things like aesthetics, recreation, peace of mind. It's where I live, hunting and fishing, all kinds of other reasons, but the investments isn't the only reason. So it shows that the people have a lot of personal care on their properties. I'm going to spend tonight talking about what I consider to be the five different options of how you can deal with your land, and then I'm going to tell you how you might approach putting a succession plan together. Would that fill a lot of your needs? Would that be our end? Okay. And I think there's one other thing, I'm going to take this out of order, but there's one other thing I'm going to jump to. I'm on the bottom of page... See, I can do this so off my head that I don't even look at this thing. I guess I'm at the bottom of page three, additional thoughts. I think this is a good background to give you before I talk about the five different reasons. If you're going to deal with your family, at some point I think everybody should talk to their family. In my case, I assumed my daughters would have an interest in the land. Our farm is the only place our daughters ever lived. A little background about our daughters. My wife and I adopted our daughters from the Philippines. They're biological sisters. They came to us when they were one and three. Came at the same time. So this is the only place that's been home to them that they consciously remember. One lives in Bangor now and has two children. The other one lives in Boston and has a daughter. And I just assumed that they would have an interest in the land and they'd want to keep that tie. But when we, in fact, started doing our own succession plan and I talked to them and my wife talked to them, they said, no, we don't have any interest in it. So I feel good that my... Beth and I, my wife's name Beth, let me refer to her. I feel good that we decided that we can pretty much do whatever we want with the land now because they've been asked and they've given us their input. When we solidify the plan and have it finally figured out, I'll want their blessings for it. But I feel good that we've asked them and I feel particularly good that they were willing to give us honest answers. I also suspect that their interests may change as they get older. Their children are already beginning to love to come to the farm and they want to be outside and they want to be in the woods with Grandpa. And so I think their moms may have a different interest as they get older. But right now my daughters are 28 and 29. They're in what I call the survival mode. So you may be able to relate to this. But they're just trying to figure out how they're going to get by every week on the money they've got on the time they've got for themselves and their family and their careers. I suspect when they're 40 or 50 that may change. So if I can live to be 80 or 90, maybe they'll have a stronger interest and they'll change the succession plan at that point. Although I kind of doubt it. But anyway, death and our demises, my wife's and my deaths are not a pleasant subject for our children to talk about. The first time I approached my daughters, they individually at different times said to me, Dad, I don't want to talk about this. Which was very sweet until I reminded them that I hadn't ever met anybody who hadn't figured out how to get out of it. Post-born maybe, but not get out of it. Our children would rather have us be living than have the land or any of our other resources. I think that's true most of the time. Our children may think that they're being disrespectful if they try to talk about what's going on on the land. They may feel like they're making you uncomfortable that they're trying to butt in. If we want our children to want the land after we're gone, we're going to have to allow them to develop their own emotional ties. And without feeling like they're horning in on us and our ties that we have with the land. And I think part of that comes about just by talking about what's going on and what Beth and I are doing and if they had an interest in what their interests were and what their thoughts were and what their plans were and we could see how we could evolve it all together. If we want our children to manage our land a certain way, then we're going to have to tell them what our wishes are. There was a survey done up in Kennedbeck County by the Kennedbeck Land Trust two years ago, maybe 30 months ago now. And one of the questions they asked was, do you have ideas about what you want to have your land used for after it's gone and how you want it managed? And their answers, they got back, was 80% of them said, yes, I do. The next question was something like, have you told anybody? Only, I think it was 21% had told anybody and of the 100 to some responses they had only one person had put their thoughts in writing. By the way, there were also 60% of the people who were surveyed in that survey and it was over 100 people. Only 40% of them had wills. So they hadn't even done the basic estate planning work. Wills don't have to be complicated, but they at least give direction and they give some clarity where it might be missing otherwise. A couple more quick points. Land can be a way to keep the family together in the future. There are many multi-generational families whose children are now spread out all over the globe who because they have a family organization set up for the future ownership of that land, they bring the kids back home once a year. They get to see each other once a year no matter where they've been. They get to talk about the farm and what's going to happen to the woodlands and what's going to happen to the fields and all that and whatever businesses that land may be involved in and then they get to have a stronger social contact. I've got one brother that I see who lives in New Jersey and I see him about every four years and maybe if we had some common interest we'd have a better life relationship than we do right now. If you didn't happen to come with your spouse tonight and you have one or you have another owner in the land you should be cognizant and aware of what their wishes are as well. I'll talk about that later on. One of the things you need to be thinking about when you go through succession planning is what do your children want? I know what my children want right now which is they want to get through the day but what are their long-term goals? What do they want? How do they relate and tie into mind? What are they willing to work for? If you have a child who has some kind of dependency issue or is overwhelmed with marrow problems or children with special needs they may not be able to work as hard to protect the farm and maintain it as another child might be able to. So what are they willing to do? Where are their focuses? Where are their priorities? And that also ties in with the next one which is what are your kids' needs? Their needs may not tie to anything that has to do with the land. And I already talked about the last one which is maturity level. So quickly that's a background for let's talk about what I think are the five options of different options of the ways you can use your land or deal with your land. Let's assume you have an interest in your land and you may or may not want to define what's going to happen or how that land is going to be used once you can no longer be at stored. Let's assume that you have an interest in the land. You own it. You got it either through inheritance or you bought it or you bought a house and the land came with it. If you don't have a high interest in what's going to happen to it in the future the first option is the easiest one and it's the most obvious one. You can sell it whenever you don't want it anymore or you can have your estate liquidated when you die. You don't have to put any strings on it because you're not concerned about how it's going to be used in the future you're going to let the next buyer do with it whatever they want and there's nothing wrong with that. That's the first option. You may decide that maybe you don't want to just be that uncaring. You may want to help pick the next buyer or you may want to interview the next buyer. I don't know. But the first option is sell it now or sell it when you die. Have your estate sell it and you've got a whole system with realtors and everything else built into ways you can do that. The second way and some of you will like to hear me saying this is to give part or all of your land value to a land trust. If you have an interest in the land you like the land you want to define how it's going to be used in the future there are at present count I think 108 land trusts in the state of Maine some of them are statewide like the Swam land trusts some of them are regional land trusts like the three rivers and some of them are particular to a particular town. But they may have an interest certainly it's a way of getting your land to be managed by an organization in the future and in the negotiations with the land trust you could determine whether you have a common philosophy of how that land is going to be managed in the future I'm not kicking anybody I'm not challenging any ideals here I just want to mention different philosophies Some land trusts are of the attitude in the state of Maine because they've talked to me and I've talked to them and others that they want the land to be forever wild they want nothing to happen on it or if anything happens on it they will allow light recreation they may or may not allow hunting they'll probably preclude the use of any mechanized vehicles may or may not allow cross-country skiing and hiking and their ideals are at that end the other end may be a land trust that says we're going to manage our woodlands sustainably we're going to harvest them regularly because we think it makes it a healthier forest it also gives the land trust some revenue stream so that they can offset some of their administrative costs of being of overseeing and anywhere in between there is whatever you negotiate with the land trust the Swam land trust has been in existence since I think the late 80s, early 90s we have 26 parcels of land and we have 16 easements we hold the 26 parcels of land one is a parcel that has conservation easement on it I think there's two that don't have conservation easements but the rest have conservation easements and no two easements are identical when they did the gifting of the property it came with some particular restrictions there's one parcel, for example in Winthrop that doesn't allow hunting most of the parcels don't the only thing that the owners as woodland owners members of Swam or Tree Farm had in mind that they wanted to know that that land would remain a woodlot and so they just wanted to make sure it was going to be managed sustainably and so I've said the second option first option was sell the land whatever you want, the second option is give the land to the land trust but 2A 2B is keep the land but negotiate with the land trust and give them a conservation easement ask them to hold a conservation easement on your property so that you can define what uses you will allow and what uses you won't allow on that land and after you're gone it's up to them and make sure that that land is being managed according to the conditions in the terms of that easement now comment about conservation easements and I don't know if it was Ellen or somebody else said next month you're going to try and do a program maybe you folks may be doing a program on conservation easements which would be a great thing a typical conservation easement that Swam takes whether it's putting it on the property that's coming or whether it's just a separate conservation easement that we become responsible for runs between 18 and 22 pages long there are page long definitions of what is a gravel pit there are several page descriptions of what is sustainable woodland management and those have grown if any of you remember the Pingree family put 1000 acres of land under conservation easements 10 or 15 years ago a lot of land down east that easement was 13 pages long now the same type of easement is 18 to 22 pages because Richard's son has because lawyers have in certain circumstances are such that we've had to expand the definitions expand the words of what we want so that the message is clear of what we want or don't want conservation easements are an interesting tool and they you need to realize as a land owner that if you ask an organization a non profit typically a non profit organization to hold an easement on your property that they're accepting a liability they're accepting a responsibility that they are going to remember typically on an annual basis at least to look at what was required in that easement go to the land, walk the land look at the land and make sure it's being managed that way okay we took an easement several years ago on a piece of land and the current owner we actually took it on a land that had been owned by the Nature Conservancy and TNC had seven parcels in the state of Maine small parcels they didn't want they came to us and they said we'll give you this one parcel with a conservation easement on it and then on these other I guess there were another seven parcels we want to sell the land but we want you to hold the conservation easements on those other seven parcels well when they did that we worked out a deal and we said sure and since then they've sold those other seven parcels to a new owner and the new owner is not following the conservation easement well SWOM, I was just in a two hour conference call today, SWOM is responsible now to go to the new owners and say you didn't do what you were supposed to you have to do that you're not managing this land sustainably this land isn't ever conditioned it doesn't have the kind of inventory now that we think can even be that can allow it to be certified which was one of the conditions that TNC put on the easement when they gave us the easement so we have an obligation now at our own cost to go enforce what the responsibilities were or what the conditions were that were in that easement so land trusts don't just walk around with their hands out and say gee I'd love to hold all the conservation easements you can give me because in fact it's a liability but in order to get I know for our land trust I can't speak for yours but for our land trust in order to know that that land is going to be available in the future as forestry managed on a sustainable basis will make that effort and quite frankly the other thing we'll do is if somebody comes to us and says we want to give you a conservation easement we're going to say well we won't take it unless you give us an endowment we're going to have some money we say if we look at the land and we'll say well we think this land is going to cost us a thousand dollars a year in actual out of pocket expenses travel and management time so we're going to want an endowment of twenty thousand dollars because five percent of twenty thousand dollars is about a thousand dollars if that's how much money we can earn on it that offsets our costs but every year on all the parcels we get aerial photos from the Sewell company after they've flown them we actually look and see if there's any changes on the ground from the aerial view if there's been any harvesting if there's new trails if there's something that doesn't look right there we go to the land, we walk it we found out they had done a harvest without having it approved ahead of time we found it was a heavy harvest they've got some erosion problems and there's some other issues Lee question there's various definitions of sustainable harvest you can write into your succession plan that you want it third party certified would you ever accept land would Swam ever accept land that had a certification standard that you thought was too onerous given the size of the land you were being given I can't speak for Swam but I suspect we wouldn't if we thought it was two owners but there are six international certification processes one of which is American tree farm system which has no cost for the land owner right now so there are and they've all got pretty much a common a common description of what sustainability is it keeps moving it keeps evolving but they're all pretty much in stride with each other so but I think that's the kind of give and take that goes on between a land trust and a property owner you've got to match the culture of the land trust with the expectations of the land owner and as I said in the 16 easements we have I don't think any two are did I answer your question or did I dodge it I didn't mean to dodge it I mean we look at a lot of things we look at we believe obviously because we're Swam we really believe in sustainable forest we turned down a property last year because the man wanted 50% of it to be forever wild we turned down another property because somebody wanted us to guarantee that they had a 40 acre sugar bush on it and they wanted us to make sure it was operated every year you know that's not what we do so I think you kind of again have to match the culture of who you're talking to with what your expectations are but I also think that it's fairly wide open so I've talked about number one, I've talked about number two A, number two B okay conservation easements have a lot of other things that go with them if you put restrictions on land you reduce its value once you get into a state planning you can talk about your succession plan and you decide okay I've got this 100 acres it's worth half a million dollars because of where it is but I want to restrict it to sustainable forestry in the future so you find out that it might only be worth 200,000 well if you give that conservation easement to a non-profit organization there may be a tax deduction there that's why you need people like this gentleman here that's why I will tell you time and time again tonight you need a professional team to help you figure out if there's a value of an advantage to you on your tax return that you might be able to benefit if you use the conservation easement and I'm not going to spend a lot of time tonight on that unless it's a real interest and then we get into it later on although I think if you do do a program on conservation easements that would be a good segment to have in there because people don't always realize there's a tax advantage and sometimes when you do succession plans how are you going to make this all work or how are you going to pay all your bills or your mother's bills or whatever sometimes things like tax treatments can help you give some of the revenue you need sometimes you may own a piece of land that the land trust really wants I was on the edge of a transaction involves Hancock Land Company which is a related company Hancock Lumber and they had eight different organizations involved in the transaction it had to do with Mt. Blue the state of Maine it had to do with the land for Maine's future it had to do with federal funds coming from the Department of Agriculture and I don't know who all the other players were I think probably TNC was in there Audubon may have been in there but they were talking about something like 3500 acres and they had money getting paid out and the millions of dollars and money going over here and tax deductions and there were all kinds of things going on but it all made it work the land got preserved the owners got to sell it and got their cash out of it got some cash out we got some tax advantages out the new buyers got to get it and the land trust got to put it under protection so those are all gains you can play but I'm not going to get that sophisticated tonight I've still got three more categories to do the third category if now we're talking about family the last three categories are family the first one was just sell the second one was deal with an unprofit organization like land trust third category starts the family section and that is I'm not sure if I have three and four or four and three in the next order but here it goes simply take that say you own 100 acres and you've got five heirs that you want the land to go to cut up the 20 acre parcels and give each of them a fifth of it now that gets into some other issues this gentleman brought up a couple minutes ago he talked about equality and equity and I think there's a difference between being equal and being equitable and I'll deal with that in a minute but if you give everybody one fifth of the land and you've got to have survey costs you won't have to get subdivision approval because it's going to people within the family but you're going to have to worry about does everybody have the same access does everybody have the same piece of land have the same value does one on a pond, does one not on a pond does one got power and another one not got power you've got all those issues plus guess what it's really hard on the land you've just taken an ecosystem a group of habitats and one manageable piece of land and you've just made it into five separate units five different sets of owners we were going to have five different potential uses in mind one may want to put a house on it one may want to keep it as a wood lot one may need or want the money and decides to sell it to a sixth person and you've got no control over that so I don't like number three but it's an option and if it fits your needs there's nothing wrong with it but I'm not going to spend a lot more time on it either the fourth option is use the old European method of dealing with what's it called bounty give it to the oldest child be done with it that's what they used to do in Europe whoever was the oldest child got all the goodies and if you had more than one child do that a little hard on the other children and that blows equity and equality right out the window but that's one thought I know of a family in southern Maine where for several generations they have given the land to one offspring but in that family's cases they had enough other resources enough other bounty enough other assets that they had other things to give the other children and in that family in each generation one child came forward and said I want to be the next steward of land I want to manage the land I love the land I'd be all happy to be land poor and give the insurance policies and the other real estate that isn't here in Maine to my siblings so they've been able to be equitable or equal but they gave all the woodland to one child because they expressed an interest and that actually happened two generations in a row so when I talk about give it all to the oldest or give it all to one which is option number four it's not going to be what and awful until you realize you may have other resources to play with and you can balance this thing out and that's where it begins to pay to talk to your children and say what do you want because in this case of this family in Maine only one child wanted the land in one of my workshops we had a woman who was in her 80s she had two sons one was a Maine forester had some position with the Maine Department of Forestry and he lived near her and he worked the land on weekends his brother lives in New York and is in public accounting and is doing quite well and returns to Maine once a year to see his mother has no interest in the land and the other son wants the land badly and when that woman came into the workshop she said to me when we went around did introductions and I said what do you want to get out of this she said I really don't know why I'm here because I can't figure out I can't solve my problem by the end of the day when she left she and her deceased husband had talked about this before he passed away wanted her forestry son to have the land but they wanted to let their other child know that they cared about him equally and her only resources was the house she lived in and the land that she owned and a small insurance policy she owned the land she owned the house and she was living on social security and some small savings and before the end of the day she walked out with her solution she wasn't going to treat the children equally she was going to treat them equitably because she and her husband owned the land they had a bit of a say on the other resources they had a bit of a say on how they were going to spread things around and she had a family meeting and the son from New York admitted he didn't want the land he liked the land it was fun to come to but it was not an important priority in his life and the other son said next to my family and you mom this is it I really want the land the son in Maine and the son in New York and the mom worked out a deal where the son in New York will get some cash the son in Maine will get the land and she dies he'll sell the house because he already has a house nearby he'll sell the house and the house lot and that will give some cash to his brother and he'll go to the bank and get a mortgage for a certain amount of money on the land and he'll give that to the brother and the brother won't get as much as he would have if they took all the assets and sold them on the open market and they each took half but he will get a good amount of bounty for his involvement in the family and being part of the family and he'll know that his parents love them but he'll also know that their wishes to have the land continue to be used for the same purpose in the future and that has evaluated him as well so we ended up treating him equitably and I think as you look at things I don't think it's selfish or unreasonable to say I'm the current generation of ownership and what I think about this is kind of important as important as what my kids get or what they think in the end because it's mine and if that's selfish that's selfish but that's my personal view okay so I've talked about number four number three was split into five equal pieces or split it up among all the kids and there we get into the issues of what's equal number four was give it to the oldest giving you two examples of how giving it to one child giving the land to one child if you were fortunate enough to have other resources allow you to work it through or at least find ways to be equitable number five is a great concept but in Maine in a lot of ways I think it's hard to do it's easier to do in Maine if the people who are going to be getting the land and the farms have a real interest in it and are willing to work the kind of hours we all know you work on a farm and if I spilled any beans over here I shouldn't have and they didn't know I'm sorry but you know if you're willing to work the 60 or 70 hours a week or 80 hours or whatever or every hour you're awake to be on the land to make it pay so you can have a living so you can be there that's great but I should tell you what the fifth level is the fifth option is that you create a corporation or an LLC or a partnership or some kind of an organization a legal organization and you give the family members or the heirs that you want to have the land you give them an ownership in that organization the organization owns the land but the family members in the next generation or whatever own the organization this allows the land to remain untouched and to continue on in the use that it is currently in and ownership can change as children die and their children's children take on the next level of ownership or what have you again you get into an area where you probably want some counseling and you probably want some professional advice if you decide to do that in Oregon where this is a pretty big strong concept the average wood lot size out there is about 600 acres that's enough to be harvesting here and creating some cash flow in Maine I think our average lot size is 40 or 50 acres I'm looking at Steve because he might know he just made a face so I don't think he doesn't know but I've heard something like 40 or 50 acres for an average wood lot obviously somewhere as small as 2 or 3 acres and some are thousands of acres that are family owned but if you want to get up to a certain level of critical mass or in the case of farms because we've got farmers in here you've got to create enough alternative forms of income whether it's for raising produce or raising animals whether it's from selling hunting leases or running a cause country ski program on your property letting people ski through your trails or whatever you've got to create some other form of revenue stream that will give you enough money to be able to pay the expenses of that organization so I like number 5 conceptually I talked about the family earlier that has one of these companies and they bring all the kids back every year for board meeting and they fly the kids back from wherever they are in the world and they all get together and they have a picnic and it's like a 3 or 4 day party and all the grandchildren get to play together and all the brothers and sisters and in-laws get to be together and the grandparents get to sit back and watch it and know that this is going to go on and that to me is an extreme case it's also a multi-generational ownership but it's an interesting concept and if you've got the resources and if you've got the family that all have a common interest in the land that's the other thing that should probably happen is everybody in the family in the next generation wants to continue to own the farm then that's the kind of thing I think that makes sense but I'm not sure it's real practical in me but it is one option I've covered the 5 types yes sir I think it's also used in transitional depending on what the value is to avoid it in here you can certainly minimize it if not avoid it yet because this depending on what the level of resources are those shares have value so you can transfer ownership over multi years if you start young enough right okay so I kind of talked about about halfway through and it's about 45 minutes since I started so I've talked about the 5 options I'm going to go on and talk about the process that's going to take me 20 minutes and then we'll have questions and answers does that work any questions before I get started no you cannot leave she's done it anyway that's the way it is in my house too anyway the process I've talked about talking to the family I've given you some examples of how families have worked things out but before you talk to anybody you need to decide whether what I've said makes enough sense that you want to do it number one and number two I think you need to decide what your interest level is and number three I think you need to decide what are your total resources what is your total bounty because the case of the woman who gave her age and had the two sons she had more resources than she realized and if we hadn't said to her what else do you own or what do you have and we wouldn't have known what we had to work with for tools to come up with a solution so the first thing I suggest to people is you create what's called a balance sheet if you've got a business background you'll understand that so I'm going to explain it to you a balance sheet is made up of all the things you own and it shows all those items listed down and then over here on this side on the other side of the other page is a list of the liabilities of what you own now hopefully as you get older those get smaller or they go away but let's say you've got assets here and you've got some liabilities maybe one of your assets was a car pickup truck and that's worth $15,000 and you still owe some money on it and you still owe $5,000 under liabilities the third part of a balance sheet is called equity or net worth and that's simply I got the truck for $15,000 the bank owns $5,000 of it I own the other 10 that's mine that's in equity and again your equity should be getting larger and your liabilities should be getting smaller if you've been fortunate enough to have a good life as you get older but you need to you need to list those out so you need to know what do I have that I need to think about what I want a succession plan for and things like checking accounts and savings accounts and things like that are easy there's no multi-generational value there other than giving it to somebody but when you talk about land or a cabin there or some special paintings or something that your great-grandfather built some furniture or something those have special value that you want to think about what you want to have happen to okay so a balance sheet gives you a background of what you've got and what you want to think about the next thing you want to do is on page 6 the thing here called the heirloom scale I don't know if I would have called it that I might call it the spectrum but this is a self-test and in my household I gave myself this test and I gave my wife one of these sheets with the following instructions and we did this separate fact we did the list sheet and the next sheet separate from each other and then we got together and we compared our thoughts the heirloom scale goes like this number one the scale is one through ten okay and a number one would be my property is one of the financial assets in my portfolio and nothing more I have no emotional attachment I don't care it's just another asset number ten at the end of the scale my property is a priceless family heirloom and it's to be protected at all costs most significant most important I'm totally emotionally involved in and in between there you can be a one, you can be a two you can be a five, a seven, a ten and so I took that test and we came up with our thoughts and under thoughts we wrote down why it was as it was and then the next worksheet was values and goals and goals in a perfect world for the next ten years the next twenty years the next thirty years what major challenges do I see standing in the way what are my immediate goals okay so after we did that Beth and I got back together and I have to understand my wife's a school teacher and holds her masters plus some other certificates intimidating because she writes everything out she can express herself well it's intimidating but anyway I love her I was a seven on the heirloom she was a two we ended up coming out as a six she decided she really liked the land a lot more and she was more interested in the land than she thought she was but her reasoning for why she was a two had to do with her goals because to her it was more important what happened to our daughters and their families than it was for what would happen to the land so she was willing to reduce her interest in the land to make sure that the girls were were going to have the best opportunity to do as well as they could and I had goals in my thinking that were more focused on the land well I want to make sure that that gets cut and I want to make sure those gels are kept pumping and I want to make sure the fields stay mowed and I want to make sure that we continue to have a property that people know they can recreate on if they take care of it and I want to support the industry and I want I want landowners to be respected and those were my kinds of thoughts and her kinds of thoughts were I want to make sure that the girls get to a point in their lives where they have a little breathing room I want to make sure that my grandchildren have the opportunity to have all the education they want and that it's paid for I want to make sure that we have time on the land that Beth and I have time on the land together after she retires so that we can enjoy it we've had it for 30 years and we wanted to all we've ever talked about being able to be on the land as much as possible a good day for us is a day that no motor starts except the John Deere it's okay for the John Deere motor to start the conference and the pickup truck they just stay in the barn that's it that's a good day when I get up to three or four days and I haven't gone anywhere I may have been on conference calls and my cell phone or whatever but I haven't had to go anywhere that's a real good week so those were her kinds of goals and out of it we came up with what we thought we had a plan that we both could support that the land was more important to us it was more important to her than she'd realized and probably I haven't asked her that question because I thought it hadn't struck me before probably part of the reason she came up on the land was because it was so important to me how did I think about it and she knew it's one of the reasons I retired five years ago was so I could spend time on the land and do things for Swam and learn more about the land but we really do share the same goals long term goals related to the land and the children and once we got our goals together we talked to the girls and we said you know next time you come and our grandchildren are eight, five and three and at the time they were one year younger each and we said to them last year usually what happens is everybody comes Saturday morning or Friday night and then Saturday night we have an ice dinner and the kids go to bed and we all sit around and talk or play a game and then Sunday morning we have pancakes and breakfast and sometimes we go out and do stuff in the woods and then sometimes they leave and I said you know this next time you come I really like to have Saturday night after the kids are in bed for all of us to talk about moms and my future well I really don't want to talk about your future because that's upsetting well we really need to do this and so a brief outline ahead of time and when they came we sat down and we said this is what we want to do with the land and we're not going to tell you what we have for resources because we never have but we're going to tell you that we think we're okay we can carry ourselves on unless something extraordinary happens but we want this is what we want for you when we pass away and that conversation probably as a family meeting should be held by the way if you look at any of the books they'll tell you it should be held for immediate family members only not spouses because spouses may not remain spouses okay and if you're talking about an heirloom of the family if you're talking about a property that's multi-generationally owned and many of them are it really should involve just the family and there are some spouses in-laws or whatever you want to call them who have strong personalities or they're the stronger of the two personalities in a relationship and they may have a dynamic they may have a different interest a different perspective that isn't related to what is the family culture and what the family wants so all the professional books will tell you that immediate family members only but anyway we let our son-in-law sit in on this one because he's part of the family anyway and we do and he did, he sat there the whole night never said a thing his wife Michelle did the talking and she's not necessarily they're pretty equal actually but anyway we told them what our thoughts were and they both came right back and said don't have an interest in them so um that takes us through the family meeting we had a family meeting and that's what that was now if there's a great book and I refer to it in here and I'll take it back to it in a minute but there's a great book put out by the University of Oregon on succession playing and they say that either one of the parents ought to call all the children you're dealing with a children's solution in your plans and say hey this is what we're thinking about we'd like you to come home, we'd like to have a family meeting we'd like to all talk about it now in some families that works just fine in other families um you really need to set things up so that they understand what the rules are going to be you're going to respect your siblings your own adults for who they are today not who they were when they were your brother or your sister you were both in your preteen years okay don't bring to the table the way they behaved or what they did to you when you were dating a girl in high school when you come to the table you come to you all come to the table today with who you are and if somebody has a substance issue, if someone has a financial problem if someone has a social problem or a maternity issue you need to respect that you need to be willing to talk about it if it comes up but not criticize it or be objectionable about it and if we're going to operate as a family we're going to have to solve some of these other problems along the line of figuring out what we're going to do with mom and dad's resources and in certain families that may require a professional counselor that may require a mediator I know of one family where they said to me we can't do this because we don't have the kind of family that can sit down and talk together and I said well then what are you going to do with your land well I guess we're going to let them figure it out well you get it you get it I said to her I said how can they figure it out when you're afraid to get them all in a room and you're there to oversee them so she saw the point and last I knew she was talking to Jessica Leahy up in Orono to see if they could find a family counselor that could help the mother and father figure out how they were going to deal with their tribe in our case our daughters decided in case you haven't been following this our daughters decided they didn't have an interest in the land I wasn't particularly shattered by it I was probably disappointed only because of the I'm a fairly romantic person but what we're going to do is we're going to do it so that the land will be sold but sometime this year I've set the goal by the end of 2014 we may have negotiated with the land trust in our case it's Luneco or Western Maine foothills one of those two land trusts both serve Otis Field and see if they want to hold a conservation easement on the land our property is 118 acres of which 35 acres is fields and the rest is woodlands and it has over a half a mile of road frontage with power and the roads are paved so it is instant developable land when I worked for Hancock Library I developed land because we owned 13,000 acres of timber lands in southern Maine and one of our things to do was to take a two acre house lot on road frontage which might have been part of a 100 or 200 or 300 acre wood lot that we had sell that off pay taxes on it and then take the rest of the money and go buy more timber land and the in the 30 years I was there we went from the 5,000 acres when I got there to the 13,500 acres when I left and that was a major part of what we did we took valuable road frontage got rid of the tax burden got the money out of it and then we went and bought more land but in our case and so along the way I did some subdivisions for Hancock Library when we had really prime pieces of land so I've done subdivisions I got a DUP award for one so I feel good about the way I did it but I don't want this land subdivided and it would be almost immediately subdivided so we're going to put some conservation easements on it if we find somebody that will hold them and we may not we may have the wills written so that they'll be put on when we pass away because I still want to keep that option open in case my 8 year old grandson decides he wants the land and he wants to work it so I'm also a very conservative individual and I don't like the certainty and the permanence that conservation easements create I won't be around but I contend in about 100 or 150 years courts will start throwing them out because land will become so valuable in certain places that the courts will override the previous owner's wishes but for the time being they're a good thing I like them I want them to go on my land if I can't be distorted as long as I'm intellectually competent and I can be a good steward of the land I want to hold that option open and plan and our own stewardship plan and the other resources are all easy other than the antiques that have been in the family for generations and don't consult as much alright I've rambled I'm done what questions do you have? earlier you were talking about conservation easements where the new owner after the property had been sold with conservation easements the new owner did not respect the conservation easement what teeth is there in those easements so that the new owner has to correct the error is he fined by the conservation probably you could write that conservation easement any way you want with whatever restrictions you want the question will be whether everybody will find that property interesting enough to buy in the case of the easement that SWOM has is holding on this property which was written by TNC the major concerns it says that we have to go ahead and pay out of our pockets any cost we incur to make things right but if we take the owner to court and the owner is found to be in violation of the conservation easement then we have to pay out of our expenses so we have to be sure that we are right but in this particular case we are probably going to spend $10,000 of legal fees in the next six months what we will do is go to court and ask for restraining order that precludes them from any activities on the property until such time as they have made the remediation of all violations so again I spent two hours on it today so that's fresh on my mind and that's what that one says you could write it that it would say they will be responsible for any cost that the land trust incurs over and above the normal management costs incurred each year because hopefully you've got an endowment to cover that cost did you get an endowment from major consumers? we did they were very good to deal with they came to us and said we want to establish a long-term relationship with you, we like what you do and we said to them look at you understand this well enough but you understand the obligations we're taking so they actually gave us a 315 acre parcel of land up in east of Southern Paris anyway it was a by both terms but anyway we acquired that and that has a pretty good inventory on it and they gave us an endowment of several tens of thousands of dollars and they gave us responsibilities to maintain this but I'm feeling very very burdened but very responsible right now that this is one of the first times in the state the state legislature in the last two years passed a law that says land trusts have to live up to the responsibilities they have was there a couple board cases? maybe it's the court cases but it was made very clear that land trusts just can't don't have the option of deciding whether or not they want to if they took the easement they're going to hold it for the nation to enforce it and so I want I've always wanted the Swam Land Trust to be a model for what other land trusts could look to do if they wanted to at least we could be an example of one way to do things and I think in this case we've got to we're just going to take these two and an additional protection that Land Order has through the conservation easement is that if the third party said the Land Trust if for some reason they're not fulfilling their obligation any citizen can take that to court to get a court to enforce the easement the earlier version of the easement was called a deed restriction and it was strictly an agreement between the person who's giving the land to the next Land Order if the terms of the agreement weren't being honored nothing else could have a say in it it was just between the person receiving the land but an easement is something that anybody could take to court and get a judgment on it the problem is you can't do much for less than ten thousand dollars so it's you really got to have a lot more what about real estate taxes on property the conservation easement if someone lets them go to Rears and they become their lien from their town or whatever then I would say that person who's the owner of the land has the risk of losing the property because the town could take it over they could exercise the lien but the Land Trust doesn't have an obligation to pay those property taxes if that's your question well that was part of that but I mean if someone continues to pay for someone's property taxes it's on there forever which is why they should be used as a good tool for conserving woodlands and farms and whatever you want one of the most exciting things I think of going on in agriculture in Maine is the work that John Piotti has done through the Maine Farmland Trust and all the conservation easements that they've put on there on farmland that it has to be used for agricultural purposes in the future I think that's just as exciting as preserving woodlands but once that conservation goes on the conservation easement goes on it's there forever what's the good average age to be thinking about succession planning 20 I've got my daughters thinking about what's going to happen if something happens to them what's going to happen to the children that's the succession planning the 3 year old needs to know what happens if she loses her mother and father well she doesn't need to know it but I need to know it so my 20 isn't to be totally facetious but I think as soon as you're in normal good health 55 is probably a good time to start saying what's going to happen to this stuff what do my kids want or what do my kids need and at least start the conversation I had a situation with my parents I'm the youngest of three brothers I had the strongest business background and my parents asked me to be the executor of their estates and my father was the second to die and he was 97 when he died by the time he died I was taking care of all his paperwork and doing everything and he literally went through the normal regression of failure, mental and physical and his body just wore out but there was that process of the parent becomes the child and the child becomes the parent which we all go through or may go through but fortunately I started talking about this when they were in their early 60's and I was actually because of my business background I was actually giving them advice and I was handling their investments at that time and I found it very helpful from my perspective to understand what they wanted because when I became the parent in that relationship I knew what they wanted and I knew what they would even if they weren't able to tell me I changed the oil on my tractor the other day and I took the garbage to the dump on my way here and I looked down and I got here and I realized somebody left I'm sorry but Richard assured me that somebody would understand I'm just going to appreciate it I have a question you had suggested earlier in one of your last stories that you were seriously looking at generation skipping is what I'm going to call it your 30 year old grandson is that the last ditch effort for you or is that a serious your advice we should be looking at generation skipping you have to be careful because there is a if not a legal there's an accounting term called generation skipping where you say I'm not giving my assets to my heirs I'm giving it to their heirs their potential heirs and you just take that right over and you avoid the second transfer that needs to get it to the third generation no I'm saying that if Owen decides he wants to go to Orinow and be a forester and he wants to move to western Maine and manage the land fine I mean Owen and I are going to play at Christmas trees this spring we're going to ruin the peach trees and the apple trees we're going to pick the blueberries together his sister is going to make fairy houses with me out in the woods and we're all going to go for walks and if they develop love for the land my generation skipping is I'm going to want the land to be there for them would the land in ownership go to one of my two daughters yeah probably whether they want to move to the farm or not they don't know but if I live to be old enough this is like 97 like my mother if I retain my mental ability which is the bigger question um I want to hold it out there for Owen if he wants but I don't think he will because all he likes to do is this show him a chainsaw I've got Jacob as my year old and I think might be interested in chainsaw and I don't know when I'm going to I never thought his father he was one but maybe maybe Jacob might be interested in chainsaw so we're not doing formal generation skipping yeah but I'm saying if there's an interest there or or if my daughter one of my daughters says okay I've been around the world and she has been and I've done all these other things and I want to be misrepresent maybe you know that story misrepresent one of my daughters favorite stories for us to read tonight um and um I can't think of the author's name she's great she's passed away um anyway Miss Rumpfias is a woman who goes off and she's a librarian in a big city and when she comes back to Maine she comes back to Maine to retire and she's the person who's responsible for all the lupins that are planted around the state and so the story goes and um if my younger daughter decides after she's done all these other things and she gets tired of living in the city she wants to come back to Maine that's okay too in which case we won't have a heavy skip in generation if you go to one of my daughters but I'm going to hold that option open but I'm going to keep that place card there in the will that says if we die conservation easements go on if the properties get liquidated I have one other question there seem to be some interest here and what these folks that are breaking the conservation need I actually do and I've heard the discussion of this could you tell us what they're doing on these land that Swoem has gotten from the Nature Conservancy essentially what is it they're doing that's breaking the conservation if you could talk about it because I won't call it petty because they never did it and they knew they had to by the conservation easement says that the conservation holder the easement holder and trust will receive a copy of the forest management plan they never gave it to us and as a new owner they had to have a forest management plan because this property had to be a third party certified that means that the land is certified as being managed sustainably and it's being harvested and maintained well it's being managed properly so we needed the forest management plan they never gave it to us they immediately started a harvest never told us about it the conservation easement called for it we were supposed to approve the prescription of what the harvest was going to entail the prescription being we're going to go in we're going to take out various species of various size we're going to do the harvest and this is how we're going to deal with the post harvest treatment of the land none of that was put together and we never received it they just simply went out in the harvest they hired a forester a good forester gave him an indication of what they wanted for a level of harvest and they just went and harvested so we didn't find out about it until we looked at the arrows and said oh my gosh there's a lot of trees that aren't here anymore and that was in 2012 they'd want all seven pieces of land so we put them on notice that they were to do no other activities on any of the seven pieces of land until we got the forest management plan which they didn't give us and until we talked about the violations related to the area that they harvested where they had the erosion and they hadn't gone back and dealt with it and they hadn't done certain post harvest treatment that I think should have been done by the end of the year and they had to be seeding down is this what you wanted to know? yeah maybe some of the folks might be interested then last year they went to a second piece another parcel and started another harvest again didn't tell us just went ahead and did it and it didn't return our calls until we had our attorney already forced her to assess what's been done and make recommendations about what needs to be done and we are now at a point where their attorney has talked to our attorney and she said we're going to address this and we're going to call you and we're going to have a meeting that was 45 days ago when nobody's called so we're calling them the day after tomorrow and saying what do you want to have this meeting or we're going to court and it was up first do you do site visits on all your monitoring or do you do aerial we do both we initially order the aerials sometimes we use Google Earth to focus on the current it also saves money but we do that initially to see if there's anything that's obvious and where should we start to focus and then we do a site visit so can the easement include language that would require such a situation as that that we would have before for the revenue and that's the middle of the revenue I could there are easements we've got one that says any harvest that is done on the land a certain share of the proceeds of the stumpage proceeds come to swamp that was another question that you shared so I think it's pretty open to whatever you want it's reasonable obviously all the parties have to agree was I clear enough on what the session planning is which this might be kind of an uncomfortable question but I'm going to ask you you seem to be you have expressed a quandary by saying that you're not sure about the longevity or the viability over the course of three or four generations of a conservation easement and yet you have illustrated to me tonight that you have a very strong feeling for the land and that as a legal vehicle that exists now as being a good device to conserve land so the question is you're not here in the room aren't you my answer to you would be I I'm skeptical the conservation easements I'll give you an example in a minute my skepticism of my personality makes me wonder if they will be honored 100 or 150 or 200 years from now because I don't even know how land is going to be used in that period of time I don't know how climate change is going to change the uses that are of land climate control speculation but I've heard speculation about climate change that says that Georgia is going to be a desert okay so I think land use could change and the demographics could be such that we may have to violate some of these conservation easements or overturn them in order to make that land available for other uses but in our current day and age I think it's one of the best tools conservation tools we have and it's the one that I'm most comfortable with using to define how that land is going to be used in that area of control you follow up question? well I personally would applaud your presentations tonight because it came obviously from the heart and it wasn't abstract in any way you told us but I take heart from the fact that individuals like yourself are in the work of implementing conservation easements and making sure that they're held in a responsible manner I appreciate that and I wish you you needn't be so skeptical I understand that Steve I'm going to piggyback on your answer back to Tom so if you want to pass it along I can jump let me tell you that I worked for the Hancock organization I get emotional about this and he's been gone since 1998 but Dave Hancock was the most amazing person I ever worked for and he was fifth generation of the Hancock family to own the land they started in business in 1848 that's the first documented time that we can find that the Hancocks had a deal going that related to land and that was to have somebody build them a soil mill we actually found the contract I suspect that they had land activities before that because they needed a soil mill so I suspect those things would go on I had the wonderful experience to watch Dave Hancock and his prime oversee the transfer of the family resources to the next generation Kevin and Matt I watched a family that multiple times has transferred successfully the resources on to the next generation and had a capable generation there both through training and basic intelligence able to manage it in any kind of economic conditions Kevin just brought the company through this most recent recession and in case you didn't know it the number of housing starts in Maine dropped 70% in volume from 2008 to 2010 so in two years 70% of the housing starts dropped eliminated no business, no materials needed and he brought the company through that period of time successfully and they're stronger than ever I had a chance to watch succession planning done properly in 1990 David was chairman of AFMP which is American Forest and Paper Products it's an international organization involving Canada and the United States and he was the president of it or the chairman of it for both countries and he spent 250 days on the road that year and Toby Hammond and I ran the company I left being treasurer in 1984 and went into general management corporate general manager in 87 so I got to watch him go out and do all kinds of things and see what was going on in the industry and then he came back and he said to his boys he said, well, when Toby went to like the Bowdoin and he said I want you to do whatever you want to do in life. Kevin, if you want to become a lawyer you should be mad if you want to be a professional basketball player you should be I want you to give me enough time that you can understand the company because by this time we had taken it from a $7 million company to in the mid-90s, in the early 90s we were probably and we were probably $80 or $90 million when I left we were $150 million and just before the recession but he said you will give me enough time that you will learn about the company you don't have to come back and work here but as the next generation you need to understand it you need to know how it works so you can give good direction to our professional management and as a result of it both boys decide to come back and be part of the company he's never pushed on him the only thing that was pushed on him was he had a responsibility to understand what happened to Dave Hancock and I don't put this but it was a way the multi-generational situation worked the reason I'm doing what I'm doing in these presentations besides the fact that I like to talk is I'm doing it because we don't have a lot of that multi-generational impact going on anymore so we've got to re-institute, restart but David he was working for a big company a big Fortune 500 company after he got out of school David's dad called him and said you need to tell me if you're coming back he was a little bit flutterer than David he said you need to tell me if you're coming back to run the company or if I'm going to sell and so David came back to work for summer and decided he liked it and put his other job and ran the company and just did marvelous things Steve well I'll jump in and applaud the Hancock lineage I guess because here in York County what we've found that has I guess probably created a path of litigiousness and rules and things like that has been the breakup of say the valley lumber just in the opposite down here so a lot of the land that we've had and seen in these blocks has been broken up it's been cut hard and this is just the exact opposite of what you've just discussed so applaud that kind of piggybacking on the comment about the easements and how that dovetails with the succession planning is that for Tom's point we have got to and this is from someone who reads these easements tries to work within their guidelines comply with them for timber harvesting, sustainability, whatever the language happens to be you mentioned earlier about the request from the landowner to have the sugar bush always managed as a sugar bush or something like that if you look at the greater span of the language of what goes on in these easements we mentioned about de-restrictions we mentioned about what you can do and what you can't do if you don't know 50 years from now what a piece of logging equipment is going to look like what technology is going to do within the woods what type of tree is going to be growing there it's almost impossible from a pragmatist like myself to put that faith in a lawyer to write that language to know what's going to happen for that so I guess I would back around to Tom's comment and that's really where my I'm not going to call it skepticism but that's where my worry comes is that from someone who is trying to abide by this language you've really got to boil the language down to my knowledge is to say I would rather prefer this very specifically not happen on my property for example is much easier to enforce for example I don't want this lot to be subdivided anymore that it already has is much easier than to say I wish this to actually happen on this property we don't know what that's going to be so and as someone who has seen this language from many different sources of conservation commissions through to nature conservancies and every level in between the language is all over the place so I have a hard time believing myself as you that there won't be some breaking of that language and therefore weakening of the structure somewhere along the way as a follow-up to that I'm going to piggyback on yours I think what's going on right now and I'm not taking one side or the other but what's going on right now at Goose Rocks is a good example of law that was in place in the past is now being looked at by the court and it's being looked at by the current generation of users or would like to be users are you going to talk about it? there's a question going on I think it's at Goose Rocks there's a question going on about who owns the property between the high water mark and the low water mark on certain parts of the beach in is that Bideford? who owns that and there's main law and then there's New England and then there's European law it goes way back forever and the court the main supreme court came back with the ruling and said it's privately owned land and it's owned all the way to the bottom of the low water and the towns are now saying we can't accept that because we have a lot of summer tourism and those tourists need to get to the water so we're going to reevaluate and we're going to challenge that I kind of make sure I don't get in my soapbox but I'm watching this case because what they're saying is people have walked on that land before and therefore they have a right of way to continue to do that they've done it for generations and therefore they have a right to do that is that the same as saying a person that has hunted on my land for several generations and therefore has the right to recreate on a year's front on top too so we're not just talking about big frontage, we're talking about what's going to happen on our lands does a hunter have a right to walk through your cornfields or your truck farms because he's always done it and you've decided to expand your operation and take a new field and put it in the cultivation and so I think that as uses change, as machinery changes some of these things are going to be looked at again and the interpretations may be adjusted and that's where I get scared but it's the best thing I know we're at 80 oh I'm sorry, more questions I just had a comment working with the land trust I've worked with a number of people and we did try to make the language anticipate future changes whatever it happens to be and not be so specific good the other thing we've done at Swam several years ago our legal bills were running 30 and 40 thousand dollars a year in the land trust area we said we're going to have a standard 18 page easement if you, the donor wish to modify this you will pay your own legal fees and our attorneys legal fees to adjust it because we think this is a pretty vanilla down the middle of the road conservation easement related to woodlands and we've only had one person decide that they needed to make changes since then and that I think it cost them $500 or something because it was just a modest thing but I think land trusts have got to do some of this kind of stuff and I would also tell you as landowners when you deal with a land trust make sure they're a good, strong land trust with a viability we've got a lot of land trusts that are getting to the end of their first generation of management, their first generation of boards people are retiring or dying or whatever and the question is going to be is the next generation of stewards for the land trust going to be there or are we going to watch the land trust merge with each other what's going to happen it's going to be an interesting thing to see but make sure you're dealing with a good, strong organization and above all figure out what you want to do talk to your family about it and then if you can get some kind of reasonable consensus get a professional team together depending on what you want to do with your attorney and accountant someone who focuses on succession planning you may want a real estate appraiser you may want a consulting forester you may want a family counselor those are the first immediate five I can think of you may not want any of them but you may have to have one or two but get good advice because this is pretty important stuff so thank you very much appreciate the time I always have to have the last word on the top of page 5 says final notes there's a website on here it's called tieswithland.org this is the University of Oregon this is the place where there's the best I think what is the best booklet right now on succession planning is the one they have it's called ties with land if you go on and Google it there's another really good booklet right now it's your land your legacy and it's put out by it's done by some organization that has to do with it