July 17, 2009 Environmental officials celebrate land preservation deal Play video

(NECN: Peter Howe, Plymouth/Wareham, Mass.) - You hear often of land-protection deals in southern New England measured in acres. But this is a rare example of one that's being measured in square miles.

After 11 years of negotiations, cranberry growers A. D. Makepeace have reached a deal with Massachusetts environmental officials and Senate President Therese Murray (D-Plymouth) to protect from development nearly 3,200 acres of makepeace land in Plymouth and Wareham.

That's roughly 5 square miles being kept green in a corner of the state that's been seeing explosive growth. The population of Plymouth, for example, has more than tripled since 1970 to about 58,000, and some nearby towns have quintupled. For years local residents feared that that wildfire of development would turn into an explosion if Makepeace -- the world's largest cranberry grower, and the biggest private land owner in eastern Massachusetts -- started developing its 10,000-plus acres of land into thousands of homes.

Friday, they celebrated a win-win of carefully controlled development and historic land protection: The outright purchase by the state of 160 acres in Plymouth and Wareham to become wildlife habitat, and a pair of 20- and 30-year state options to buy 3,000 more acres, adjacent to Myles Standish State Forest, that will protect those areas from development. It includes pine barrens and wetlands and home to endangered warblers and thrashers and turtles like the Northern Red-bellied

cooter, and rare insects, freshwater mussels, and plants like the New England Blazing Star and Barren's Buckmoth.

Mary Griffin, Massachusetts Department of Fish and Game commissioner, said, "This is our biggest conservation deal in decades ... There's a number of rare species here. The size of the amount of land we're talking about protecting here over time is huge.''

Wayne Klockner, Massachusetts director of The Nature Conservancy, said, "Given where this is, right near the population centers of Providence and Boston, given its significance in terms of ecology and rare species this area supports, I think it's a huge deal.''

Michael P. Hogan, president and CEO of the Makepeace company, said the family and "our board of directors determined early on that this land was important and warranted a creative approach to development. Working together, we all achieved that.'' Hogan said he remembers years ago seeing bumper stickers all over southeastern Massachusetts reading "Makepeace: Keep It Wild," and he says today they could be updated to, "Makepeace Kept It Wild -- and Will Keep It Wild."

Howe: Another key part of this deal is that Makepeace gets, through specially negotiated local zoning, to do some densely clustered residential development that's surrounded by lots and lots of conservation land, like the new Tihonet Pond development in Wareham and a planned 1,100-home River Run development just now beginning in Plymouth east of the state forest. Sensitive wildlife habitat around River Run is becoming a state refuge. Makepeace has erected a test tower near a cranberry bog in southwestern Plymouth to see whether it could feasibly use wind turbines to generate much of the developments' electricity.

State Representative Vinny DeMacedo (R-Plymouth) said he's always respected the Makepeace family's right to develop and reap the value of land they've owned for a century. And DeMacedo said Plymouth welcomes growth. But if they hadn't reached this 70/30 land protection/development deal, he says Plymouth would have been overwhelmed. "They could have really taken advantage of a huge building boom,'' deMacedo said. "Easily thousands of homes that they could have brought in, and had they chosen the other route of just full-fledged development, that would have had very difficult implications for the town of Plymouth" in terms of the cost of providing infrastructure, schools, and police and fire protection and public works.

Howe: One lesson conservation officials stressed about the Makepeace deal is while the real estate market is deeply depressed now, it's going to come back someday, and it is never too soon for them to get started trying to protect those remaining wild spaces in New England, like the vast swaths of pine forest A. D. Makepeace has promised to keep wild.