One of the other hats I wear is that of chair of the Saluda Planning Board. It’s just an appointed position that pays nothing and requires you to stay awake and engaged for hours at a time discussing municipal zoning, housing density, sign ordinances, and a whole bunch of other topics that most people wouldn’t touch with a proverbial 10-foot pole.

Betsy Burdette is not one of those people. As the driving force behind the Saluda Community Land Trust, she lives, eats and breathes that kind of stuff. A land trust is what you go to when you’ve got a bunch land that the government wants to tax, but you and your family aren’t so keen on paying the taxes. You also don’t want to sell out and find your back yard turned into a subdivision of cookie-cutter homes. In these parts, she’s the one who will set you straight about how have your cake and eat it too.

Land conservancies can buy development rights but leave the land itself in the original owner’s hands. The owner loses the ability to build a subdivision, but gets a tax bill that's a fraction of what the  assessors could otherwise charge. The conservancy then extinguishes the development rights — forever — and replaces them with what’s called a conservation easement. For families who are land rich and cash poor this is often the only way to make everybody happy.

We all love the idea of preserving the rural character of Polk County. But if we preserve too much land, where are we going to build all that affordable housing that we all know we need to build if instead we’re all setting up conservation easements?

Believe it nor, Betsy and the land trust have an answer for that. So this Labor Day, I headed over to her house just outside of Saluda on Puzzle Gully Road to find out how this can be possible. We also talked about the sleazy real estate deals of the 70s, the hazards of poor record keeping, and why land-owners should pay a lot more attention to the boring parts of the real estate business and municipal planning.

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