Talking Shop with Santa

I was a little surprised when I bumped into Santa at the Forest Society offices earlier this week. I figured a guy with his job would be far too busy wrapping things up at the North Pole to be hanging around the Conservation Center in Concord this close to Christmas Day.

He was sitting in what’s known as the Ayres Room, named for Philip Ayres, who was the first President/Forester of the Forest Society a century ago. With his red coat hanging on the back of his chair, Santa sat pensive and pondering with his prodigious belly giving his suspenders a workout. A vast array of papers were spread out on the table in front of him. He looked a little stressed and not particularly jolly.

“Hello there, Nick,” said I, “are those your lists of who’s naughty and who’s nice?”

He turned his rosy-cheeked visage to look at me.

“Oh I wish,” Santa said. “But I’ve got people who handle all that. Big data, you know. Fella named Snowden, works freelance out of Moscow these days.”

Snowden. Of course, the name should have been a dead giveaway.

“No, my friend,” continued Santa, apparently grateful for the diversion, “this is a personal errand. I’m here doing a little research on conservation easements.”

I laughed. “You’re going to conserve the North Pole?”

“I gotta do something,” he said, nodding. “Property taxes are killing me and they don’t have Current Use in the Arctic. And the view tax—don’t get me started!”

But it was too late—he was on a roll.

“The toy biz isn’t what it used to be, you know, too much competition. Margins are thin. Once Disney bought out the Star Wars franchise they started squeezing all the vendors, me included, and I’m clearing maybe a few cents on every Sphero BB-8. Walmart gets better pricing than I do! And all those elves? Health insurance is a killer and half of them are on workers comp with carpal tunnel! Then there’s the reindeer—think about what it costs to feed all those reindeer all year long just so they can work one day a year? Brutal!”

“Plus, the Missus and I aren’t getting any younger,” he said, turning wistful. “We don’t have kids of our own and I want to make sure whoever takes over keeps the Pole the way it’s always been.”

Santa thinking about passing on his legacy? I thought Santa lived forever, in perpetuity.

He looked around, beckoned me to lean in close, and whispered, “To be frank, a few of those elves I just don’t trust much at all. Shifty little fellas.”

A co-worker of mine walked by the open door and looked in. Santa sat up quickly, his belly jiggling like a bowlful of jelly.

“Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas!” he bellowed, waving. My co-worker didn’t seem to see or hear him. She smiled at me with a strange look on her face and walked on. I get that look a lot.

“You know, Nick, while there can be tax advantages associated with conservation easements, that’s not their purpose,” I said. “The goal is to protect meaningful conservation values that have public benefit.”

“Yes, I know,” Santa said.  “I think I understand the basics—I grant certain development rights at the North Pole to a land trust, while retaining other rights. Certain uses could be allowed, like toy-making and reindeer husbandry, while other uses, like drilling for oil, can be expressly prohibited. I can put most of my property under easement and carve out an area around the house and my sleigh garage where I have more flexibility. But what if we need a new bunkhouse for the elves? What if the septic fails and I need a new leach field?”

“Easements can sometimes make provisions for those sorts of things, especially if you’re able to foresee the potential for them,” I tried to explain. “It really depends on the specific place you’re protecting, the conservation values of that place, the purposes of the easement and the specific wording of the easement that protects those values.”

“But great googly moogly I can’t predict everything,” Santa said, throwing up his hands. “Who knows what toy-making will be like in 200 years? Or even 25 years? Heck, there isn’t even any land under all that ice at the North Pole! What about climate change? It could all be ocean in no time at all! What then?”

“Then I think we’ll find out how long elves can tread water,” I said. Santa gave me a dirty look and I got the feeling that come Christmas morning my stocking is going to be a local carbon-sink. Again.

“What I need,” Santa said, thumping his chubby-fingered fist on the table, “is a conservation easement with one simple paragraph that protects everything forever but still lets me do whatever I think I need to do to bring joy to the children of the world. Can’t the attorneys draw that up for me?”

“I’m afraid it’s just not that simple,” I said. “And you know as well as I do that there aren’t many lawyers who believe in a Santa clause.”

Jack Savage is the Executive Editor of Forest Notes, the quarterly magazine of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests. Contact him at jsavage@forestsociety.org or follow him on Twitter @JackAtSPNHF.