“We’re losing our small-town feel.” “Boerne is just growing too fast.” “Every green space in Boerne is being sold and gone to house and businesses.”
“The ‘small’ town ambiance, the beautiful open farm and ranch land, so much of that has disappeared.”
These actual comments echo the sentiments of many Boerne and Kendall County residents as the area’s appealing “small-town feel” gives way to seemingly unbridled development and the resultant urban sprawl.
But there is a program — established by voters themselves — that can change all that.
In November 2022, Kendall County voters approved Proposition A, which set aside up to $20 million for “acquiring open space and conservation land and for acquiring conservation easements on land.”
Tom Frost III, longtime landowner and businessman, said a conservation easement under Prop A is a legal document that allows you to protect your land.
Forever. “I have my land in a conservation easement and when I go to bed at night, I know that my land will never be subdivided into a residential or commercial subdivision,” Frost said.
“I come from eight generations of German descendants in Kendall County,” he added, “and I'm very proud of this land here; I want to make sure that it stays in one piece.”
Upon Prop A’s passage in 2022, Kendall County Commissioners Court appointed 12 county residents to a Prop A Committee, which has been tasked with identifying land acquisitions for purchase or through conservation easements through that Prop A funding.
With Prop A, Frost said, landowners don't declare what they want to have done with their land. “Instead, you say what you want to restrict,” Frost explained. “You can still have building envelopes, where your kids or your grandkids can build houses.
“You're not selling your land. You're not inviting people to come on to it,” he said. “You're just selling the easement document to a land trust so they can monitor your restrictions to make sure in perpetuity that they're followed.”
Two Kendall County Conservation workshops are set in the coming weeks to explain to area landowners how they can preserve their land through conservation easements — and guarantee never to have that land available for the development that so many fear is coming.
On March 26, from 5:30-7 p.m. at The Lobby Coffee Shop, 523 Seventh St. in Comfort, Prop A Committee members will provide a high-level overview of conservation easements and the funding available to make it happen.
The second — April 11, 9 a.m. to noon at Herff Farm, 33 Herff Road — is for landowners and property managers. A registration fee of $10 or $15 per family includes a light lunch, refreshments and educational resources.
There’s land being bought and sold every day in Boerne and Kendall County. Some of these sales might not be what the original landowner may have wanted. But as land ownership is passed down through generations, intent often changes, as does the amount offered to generational landowners.
With the county’s Prop A committee’s assistance, land “set aside” stays that way — free of development.
“You aren't giving anything up,” Frost said. “You're just gaining the fact that you're protecting your land into perpetuity. That means that, 10 generations from now, somebody can't just come in and go, ‘Hey, I'm changing this.’ It's really an ironclad thing.”
Frost said the Prop A Committee’s $20 million allows it to help resident landowners who might not have the funds necessary to begin the conservation easement process. The passage of Proposition A locked in that $20 million that can be used, if you qualify as a good easement, to pay these closing costs for you so you still would get a tax break.
Because landowners seeking a conservation easement are technically reducing the value of their land by not selling it for its highest use — which is a subdivision, apartment complex or business park/strip malls, etc. — they receive a tax break for that investment in conservation of land.
Frost rests easy, knowing he has locked his land into an easement that forbids certain uses “like no subdivisions and no downward-facing lights ... so that the stars are beautiful in the future,” he said. “I also have no strip mining or removing of limestone to make cement. I don't allow my water rights to be sold, so that we don't strip this land of water and keep it for the future,” he said.
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