Association of Vermont Conservation Commissions

The Orange County Headwaters project began to emerge in 2002 in the towns of Corinth and Washington, VT. The project stemmed from a community interest in maintaining the character of the area in the face of increasing development of these largely forested and agricultural towns due to the short commuting distance to Barre/Montpelier and the Upper Valley area of VT and NH. As towns surrounding the area became increasingly more fragmented by development, the landowners of Corinth and Washington decided that they needed to do something to stabilize the land uses in order to act as a way to mitigate their towns' lack of zoning. This led to the formation of the OCHP. The OCHP is a grass roots project that involves landowners donating their development rights to qualified land trusts in order to prevent heavy future development. The community paid $10,000 and received $10,000 from a challenge grant application in order to conduct a feasibility study and to begin the OCHP. The study involved gathering a steering committee that conducted landowner outreach to determine the community's level of interest in conservation, producing a GIS map with parcel information, and ultimately producing a project proposal. After the proposal was completed, the OCHP partnered with the Vermont Land Trust and the Upper Valley Land Trust and signed MOU's that laid out shared responsibilities between the OCHP board and coordinators (Ben Machin and Virginia Barlow) and the land trusts. Essentially, the OCHP was responsible for the local aspect of the land donations, while the land trusts were responsible for some funding and the education of the landowners about their donations. Over the course of the OCHP, over 35 parcels have been conserved through the donation of landowner's development rights to the Upper Valley and Vermont Land Trusts. The land is conserved under the values of protecting water resources, wildlife, and forests, as well as keeping a working landscape of farms and recreation. The project originally had a timeline of about three years. However, land parcels are still occasionally donated to the land trusts under the OCHP.