Land Board Grants Tentative Approval of Conservation Easement to Protect Northwest Montana Timberland

Former Lincoln County Commissioner Mark Peck doesn’t have to look far to imagine the future of northwest Montana’s working forests if the state land board doesn’t grant final approval of a conservation easement between Kalispell and Libby, precluding development and protecting public access on an 85,792-acre parcel of private timberland.

“We don’t even have to use our imagination to know what Lincoln County is going to look like if we don’t keep these large tracts of timberland intact. We can already see the contrast,” Peck said Monday morning at the Montana Land Board meeting in Helena. “This land will be sold and subdivided. It will completely change the complexion of Lincoln County.”

From his office at F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber Company in Columbia Falls, Paul McKenzie doesn’t have to look far, either. As vice president and general manager of the 112-year-old family-owned timber outfit, which holds 39,000 forested acres in Flathead and Lincoln counties, McKenzie said the company’s acreage only produces about 5% of what’s needed to keep its mills churning; the balance comes from land owned by large timber corporations who are increasingly turning to conservation easements as a strategy to gird against development and generate revenue while managing the forest as a generational investment.

“Stoltze knows firsthand how conservation easements support family-owned companies,” McKenzie said Monday. “We have participated in three different conservation easements so far, and without the option to conserve those acres, they would be growing a lot more houses than they are trees right now in northwest Montana.”

Addressing the Montana Land Board’s five members on Oct. 21, Peck and McKenzie were among about 10 people who spoke in support of the two-phase Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement project. In a 3-2 vote, the land board granted tentative approval of the project on the condition that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) and its partners amend the terms of the easement to expressly guarantee a third-party owner’s subsurface mineral rights.

As the board considered the project’s first phase, which would protect 32,981 acres in the Salish and Cabinet mountains, proponents described it as the culmination of a years-long effort by FWP, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land and landowner Green Diamond Resource Company, which in 2021 purchased 291,000 acres of private timberland from Southern Pine Plantations (SPP), the real estate and investment company that in 2019 bought 630,000 acres from Weyerhaeuser Co., which acquired the land in 2016 from Plum Creek.

Despite the succession of private ownership, the land has been managed for de facto public access for more than a quarter century, in large part because the timber companies have been invested in long-term forest management as opposed to piecemeal development deals. But as demand for land intensifies in this corner of the state, so has a campaign to furnish permanent protections on northwest Montana’s working forests, which under a conservation easement can continue to produce lumber for local mills while allowing public access and preserving wildlife habitat, even as the state collects property taxes.

“We already have conservation easements working in Lincoln County, and I wish I could show you the contrast of the land next to them. I wish I could show you pictures of these large ‘no trespassing’ signs,” Peck told members of the land board. “You’re under surveillance. And I understand why. I’m a private property rights guy. But I am here representing the citizens of Lincoln County and the commissioners of Lincoln County to ask you to please support this easement. If these lands don’t stay on a large industrial landbase we can forget seeing any manufacturing capacity for wood products here in the future.”

Barry Dexter, director of resources at Stimson Lumber Company, which owns hundreds of thousands of forested acres spanning northwest Montana, northern Idaho and northeastern Washington, said the pressure on landowners to sell has already converted the region’s timber base to non-forest uses; at one point, Dexter said he was receiving unsolicited offers on an almost daily basis.

“I’ve been personally associated with these forests for over five decades, so I have seen this large private timberland landscape dwindle down to what’s left now,” he told the land board. “So we are truly at a critical point where we can try to preserve what’s left or we can just allow it to be developed.”

The effort to preserve what’s left has become a rally cry in recent years, particularly after SPP sold 475,000 acres through 49 land sales in the span of a year, with the sales ranging in size from 4 acres to the 291,000 acres Green Diamond acquired. Although most sales were in the 350-acre range, the second-largest sale was to a private individual who bought 125,800 acres between Flathead and McGregor lakes, now known as the Flathead Ridge Ranch.

Kyle Schmauch, communications and policy manager for the Senate Republicans of the Montana Legislature, said that as a sixth-generation Montanan who grew up hunting and fishing in the footprint of the proposed conservation easement, he was compelled to advocate for its approval out of personal, not professional, interests.

“This is home turf for me,” Schmauch told the land board. “Kenelty Mountain, which is next to the phase-two portion of this project that’s not under discussion today, is named after my great grandpa. My uncle in Libby is one of a few employees keeping the lights on at the Montanore Mine. The first deer I shot was next to this proposed easement and I learned to hunt elk nearby.”

Schmauch said his parents and brother live next door to the sprawling Flathead Ridge Ranch property, much of which remains open to public access. Even as the private landowners impose some access restrictions on the public, that class of ownership represents an unlikely alternative if the proposed easement between FWP and Green Diamond fails.

“To their credit, they have kept a lot of it open,” Schmauch said of the owners of Flathead Ridge Ranch. “But this is the absolute best-case scenario for a private land purchase. The alternative, and the much more likely scenario, is the same existential threat that exists across northwest Montana, which is that it will be parceled off and subdivided for ranchettes. This area up between Kalispell and Libby is where all the locals go to recreate, hunt, camp, and fish. This is where the local blue-collar workers go.”

Even with the groundswell of support for the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement project, it wasn’t an easy sell to some members of the Montana Land Board.

Of the roughly 150 comments submitted to the land board regarding the Montana Great Outdoors Conservation Easement project, including letters of support from trade associations such as the Montana Wood Products Association, and from sportsman groups including the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, one significant stakeholder opposed it — WRH Nevada Properties, LLC, of Rexburg, Idaho, which owns mineral rights underlying a large swath of the project area.

According to FWP, a contractor assessed the property and determined that the potential for development of the mineral estate is “so remote as to be negligible.” That didn’t stop WRH Nevada from suing to protect its interests and stop the conservation easement from proceeding, however, which became a sticking point for several land board members who sought reassurance on Monday.

The board consists of Montana’s five top elected officials: Gov. Greg Gianforte, Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, Attorney General Austin Knudsen, Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen, and Securities and Insurance Commissioner Troy Downing.

“Is it appropriate for the Land Board to be making a decision at this time if there is active litigation?” Jacobsen asked government attorney Alan Zackheim, who explained that a district court judge in Libby ruled that even if the conservation easement is approved, “nothing prevents the plaintiffs from capitalizing on their mining interests.”

“The most recent order dissolved the temporary restraining order that had been in place, so at this point FWP and all of the parties are free to act,” Zackheim said, adding that the Montana Supreme Court agreed with the lower court’s assessment when it denied WRH’s motion seeking a writ of supervisory control and allowed FWP to proceed with the easement.

That wasn’t enough to sway Knudsen, who announced his intention to oppose the easement on principle alone, saying he doesn’t agree with easements that do not include a sunset clause.

“I am not going to support this because it’s a perpetual easement,” Knudsen said. “I fundamentally don’t agree with perpetual easements. I am not opposed to easements in general. I just simply don’t personally philosophically like the idea of a forever, forever, forever conservation easement … Forever is a long time.”

Arntzen said she thought any affirmative vote was “premature” given the pending litigation and the testimony from WRH attorney Peter Scott, who insisted that the court’s rulings were open-ended until Gianforte asked him to “please be seated.”

“I think you’re trying to mislead people,” the governor told Scott.

Jacobsen said her concerns would be eased if the land board’s support for the easement was amended in a way “that made it crystal clear that nothing in the easement infringes on these mineral rights” and that “it is the intent of the land board to allow for the potential of future [mining] activity.”

Gianforte supported Jacobsen’s motion for an amendment, saying it would give the board an opportunity to more fully endorse the conservation easement in a month, once the terms were redrafted with the assurances in place.

“There is no way to put a bow on it. This is just the society we live in,” Gianforte said of the pending litigation. “We’d like to have a completely clear field with no objections but sometimes we have to make a decision. But if we end up not passing this we are missing a huge opportunity for the people in the northwest portion of this state.”

FWP Director Dustin Temple said the agency would “work with all the stakeholders to try and ratify the intent of the land board here today.”

Acknowledging the efforts and resources already invested in the proposed project, including a $20 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Legacy Program, which expires if the project doesn’t receive final approval before Dec. 31, 2025, Gianforte was hopeful the project would cross the finish line.

“We have a lot of folks who have invested a lot of energy in this over the years, and the consensus we are building seems to be that if there was language in place that satisfied us that the mineral rights would not be violated by this easement, we would have the votes on this land board,” Gianforte said. “It would make sense to me that we vote on this motion with the understanding that this language would come back to us for final approval. That would allow us today to approve the easement, with the single reservation that we want clarity on the mineral rights, and that the private property rights are not diminished.”

Gianforte continued: “I want to be on record supporting this easement. We will have another bite of the apple at a future meeting.”

With the provisional amendment in place, the motion to approve the easement passed on a 3-2 vote. Knudsen and Arntzen voted in opposition.

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