Nomination Statement for Mountains & Plains Region Candidate
Kate Sattelmeier

I began my work for the Summit Land Conservancy as a part-time easement monitor and part-time legal counsel in 2010. In the following years, I developed the Conservancy’s monitoring report template, a tracking system for continuing stewardship issues, and our policy to address easement violations based on Terrafirma protocols. Land Trust Alliance and Terrafirma resources were essential to our small land trust’s understanding of stewardship tasks. I am proud to say that for the Conservancy’s recent LTA re-accreditation, we received a commendation for our monitoring reports.

Through my role as in-house counsel for the Conservancy, I have addressed easement violations, title challenges, reserved right requests and changes in land uses. I have dealt with the complexity of drafting an understandable letter to a landowner to address a violation when the easement terms conflict with each other and do not address the specific land use. I also understand the importance of a land trust’s reputation and relationships, and the difficulty of enforcing easement violations with important community partners.

I have led the acquisition of new conservation easements and fee-properties. Much of the work has been with “100-year landowners” and I have addressed boundary lines that overlap by thirty feet, legal descriptions that don’t close, unrecorded access roads, out-of-date landowner entities, water rights still in the grandfather’s name, the mineral estate of every odd-section being owned by the railroad and other issues related to lands that have not seen a transaction in a long time. I have also worked on out-of-the-box projects with municipalities and developers where community benefits have included public access to thermal waters and green burial. Land Trust Alliance and Terrafirma policies and resources have been invaluable in figuring out how to solve problems in unusual situations and engage in practices that mitigate risk. I hope to bring my on-the-ground experience to the Terrafirma Members Committee and support the land trust community in the pursuit of resilient conservation easements and successful conservation easement defense.