By Steve Erickson

The Conservation Futures program is funded though a tax that costs the average Island County property owner less than $15 per year. For that paltry amount, key recreation areas, working farmland and important habitat areas have been permanently protected by either outright purchase or through conservation easements restricting development.

Two of the current county commissioners are apparently concerned that Conservation Futures is somehow inhibiting so-called “economic development.” It is not. There is no economic downside to the Conservation Futures program.

In 1971, the state Legislature adopted, and Republican Gov. Dan Evans signed, the law establishing the Conservation Futures program. It said: “… the haphazard growth and spread of urban development is encroaching upon, or eliminating, numerous open areas and spaces of varied size and character, including many devoted to agriculture, the cultivation of timber and other productive activities, and many others having significant recreational, social, scenic or esthetic values.

“Such areas and spaces, if preserved and maintained in their present open state, would constitute important assets to existing and impending urban and metropolitan development, at the same time that they would continue to contribute to the welfare and well-being of the citizens of the state as a whole. The acquisition of interests or rights in real property for the preservation of such open spaces and areas constitutes a public purpose for which public funds may properly be expended or advanced.” [RCW 84.34.200.]

Since Island County’s Conservation Futures program was begun in 1991 by an all-Republican board of county commissioners, it has funded the protection of 3,031 acres, roughly split evenly between outright purchase of land and conservation easements restricting development. [Source: Island County]

The land area of Island County is about 133,210 acres. [Source: Wikipedia]

Over the last 24 years, the Conservation Futures program permanently prevented or restricted development of fewer than 2.28 percent of Island County, or less than 1/10 of 1 percent per year. At this rate, it will take until 2097 to protect a mere 10 percent of the county from development.

And what is the economic impact of open space in Island County? The state Recreation and Conservation Office recently commissioned a statewide study of the economic impact of recreation in Washington. It concluded that there were about 3,000 jobs in Island County dependent on recreation.

After the military, tourism and recreation is the largest employment sector in the county. Those jobs are dependent on open space now and in the future — including when the huge numbers of currently undeveloped lots in the county are later developed. People don’t go to suburbia to recreate. They go to places where there are forests, prairies, beaches and farms — open space.

Of course, recreation jobs are just one economic benefit from open space.

There are numerous other economic and environmental services open space provides, such as groundwater recharge, storm water control, pollution removal, noise attenuation, climate amelioration and increased value of nearby private property, a very large economic value in itself.

Whidbey and Camano are islands. There will always be transportation bottlenecks inhibiting development. This is the nature of islands. It doesn’t matter if you personally like or dislike this reality. It’s just the way it is.

What Whidbey and Camano islands do have is green space. And that is their longterm economic and environmental capital in a region where suburban and big box sprawl have run rampant.

If anything, Conservation Futures and similar programs should be drastically ramped up while it is still possible. Because when those thousands of currently undeveloped lots each have a house behind 20-foot-wide tree buffers waiting to blow down in the next big storm, there will not be 3,000 recreation jobs in Island County.

And you better bring your sleeping bag with you when you get in the ferry line or try to drive across the bridge.

Steve Erickson is a member of Whidbey Environmental Action Network, a nonprofit environmental organization located on Whidbey Island.