PASO ROBLES, Calif. — With a rugged grandeur that harks to the Old West, Las Tablas Ranch embraces more than 10 square miles of oak-draped hills and rolling pastures.
The cattle ranch is 20 miles west of here, near Lake Nacimiento, where vineyards and home construction have been consuming open space and oak woodlands.
So neighbors and local conservationists were much relieved when the owners, the family of rancher Mike Bonnheim, signed an agreement a few years ago to forever protect most of their land from development.
But soon they were startled and dismayed to hear the piercing whine of chain saws and see pallets of freshly cut and split oak trucked from the ranch, bound for firewood markets.
"It was hundreds of truckloads, easily," said Ralph Ward, a neighbor who works as a carpenter. "I do not consider cutting live oaks conservation.... I am very sad.... I am not an extreme tree hugger."
The cutting goes on, specifically allowed under a conservation easement that the owners signed with a local land trust in return for lucrative development credits granted by San Luis Obispo County.
Conservation easements are land-use agreements that usually provide financial incentives for keeping land primarily as open space. Some easements have become controversial, however, because they resemble tax shelters or don't meet public expectations for conservation.
The Bonnheim ranch easement "was negotiated under the guise of halting development in rural areas," said former county planning commissioner and environmental activist Pat Veesart. "How is timber [cutting] consistent with the purpose of a conservation easement?"
Veesart's criticism is part of the nationwide debate over how best to structure and police conservation easements to ensure that natural resources are protected and that the public dollars that often help underwrite the easements are well spent.
The easements have become an important tool for preserving land and habitat while keeping it in private hands. But abuses and weaknesses, including spotty monitoring, have emerged with the rapid expansion of easements, which cover millions of acres across the country that are supposed to be supervised by thousands of private land trusts.
Typically, an owner who agrees to protect land from development can be eligible for tax breaks and other financial relief. That is the case with the Bonnheims' ranch.
