Land Protection Program
 The Skaneateles Lake Watershed Land Protection Program (SLWLPP) is a partnership between the City of Syracuse and Skaneateles Lake Watershed residents. The program is aimed at maintaining high water quality within the watershed by protecting the farmland, forests and other open spaces that act as natural buffers to the region’s streams, rivers and other waterways.
How does the program work?
The SLWLPP protects water quality by limiting the development of environmentally significant properties within the watershed. The program’s principal activity is to purchase permanent conservation easements from willing landowners. Conservation easements are voluntary legal agreements that restrict development and practices harmful to water quality.
How do the City of Syracuse, watershed communities and landowners benefit from the program?
By protecting the Skaneateles Lake watershed’s wetlands, forests and farms – nature’s water filters –the SLWLPP helps maintain high drinking water quality. Everyone who uses water from Skaneateles Lake – including lakeshore residents, the Town and Village of Skaneateles and the City of Syracuse –benefits from healthy drinking water.
The SLWLPP helps to protect the scenic, rural character of watershed communities. Working farms and forests, wetlands and other natural areas define the region and make it an attractive place to live and visit.
Landowners in the watershed also benefit from the SLWLPP. In exchange for the conservation easement, the program compensates the landowner for the appraised fair-market value of development rights. Property protected by a conservation easement stays in private ownership and remains available for farming, forestry, hunting and other forms of recreation that are compatible with water quality protection. These agreements do not require public access. What lands will be eligible for the program?
The SLWLPP focuses its efforts on protecting environmentally significant properties with features that make them important for water quality protection, such as the size of the property, proximity to the City of Syracuse’s water intake pipes and hydrological significance of the property. Environmentally significant properties may include working farmland, managed forest properties or other natural areas. Funding for two-thirds of the purchase costs have come from the City of Syracuse. On three special projects, the balance has been supplied by matching grant funds from the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Federal Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program.
The grass buffer in the foreground of this conservation easement land holds the soil in place on steep slopes.
Program News:
12/20/08 - Since last year, the City of Syracuse has added 276 acres to its conservation easements purchased in the Skaneateles Lake Watershed. That brings the total to 787 acres conserved with 234 acres of vegetated buffer protection on streams flowing to the lake. An additional 182 acres of land are also under contract to close. These will be the final easement acres that the City purchases under the Land Protection Program, which stopped taking new contracts in July 2008. An annual stewardship monitoring visit to the properties and good relationships with the landowners helps the City to ensure that the land remains in its undeveloped condition.
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