One Compact, every town, 35 years
A quiet national model has helped conserve thousands of acres
Mark Robinson was standing in his office at the end of a long funky driveway in the Brewster woods, the former home of writer and naturalist John Hay.
“This was his bedroom, that’s where he used to sleep!” Robinson laughed, pointing to the corner behind his desk. “Sometimes I get the feeling he’s looking over my shoulder, asking, ‘Hey, what land have you saved today?’”
Over 35 years, plenty of days would have merited a positive answer. That’s how long The Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts has been around, and how long Robinson has been point man. The Compact, a nationally celebrated model, supports towns, land trusts and conservation foundations by cobbling together deals, negotiating with private landowners and public officials, raising money, even offering structural support like group health care or helping file tax returns.
Every Cape town can point to at least one property, often multiple transactions, that have Robinson’s fingerprints on them. There are now 31 organizations under the Compact’s umbrella, the latest a group trying to keep Twin Brooks golf course in Hyannis from subdivision. The variety of purchases and deed restrictions includes rolling upland and bogs, forest and marsh, beach access, easily accessible roadside parcels and woods as remote as Cape land can be.
Since 2000, local trusts and foundations have closed 890 projects that now protect 5023 Cape Cod acres by outright purchase, deed restrictions, or other tactics Robinson employs. That’s multiple times more activity than any other county in the state, and doesn’t count town efforts that would easily double that acreage.
In honor of the Compact’s 35th birthday, I asked Mark to take me to two places; where the first deal came down 35 years ago, and a most recent success.
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We stood on “High Head” in North Truro, leaving our cars in a “scenic area” parking apron off Route 6, tromping wind-swept habitat of pine, oak, and low growth, staring across the bay to the hook of Provincetown beyond.
“This bluff was the end of the glacier,” Robinson said, the curving land below created from accreting sand, “and the start of my career.”
The year was 1986. A Rhode Island developer had plans for a 22-lot subdivision, including what would have been the first concrete noise baffling wall on the Cape, one of those zigzagging constructions seen on the Jersey turnpike. To keep all that from happening was going to take $3 million, “and no one had that,” he remembers.
No single entity anyway. For the first time on Cape Cod, groups sat down and cobbled together multiple contributions for a single goal. There was the Truro Conservation Trust and The Nature Conservancy, the state Highway Department (they didn’t want the wall) and interests looking to protect water supplies as well as habitat and views.
“This project spurred it on, made people realize it could happen,” said Robinson. Six groups coalesced to create a Compact that could provide opportunities to learn from each other, support each other, and engage a full-time professional, Robinson, who could ride herd.
“My mission was simple, to support their missions,” he remembers. “Each had their own culture and needs, so my idea was to do whatever the land trusts wanted to do. That made it easy for me to do a strategic plan, because it wasn’t necessary. I’m proud to say I’ve never done one.”
High Head became a poster child for conservation cooperation with another great calling card as Robinson built the idea of a Compact: The purchase didn’t need a single dollar of Truro taxpayer money.
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The recent bookend deal is in the interior of Brewster. This one also has an evocative name, “Mother’s Bog,” though the property courses deep into woods and includes beautiful frontage on Pine Pond.
The mother was Louisa “Lulu” Crowell, one of many intertwined old Cape Cod families with familiar names like Sears and Nickerson, born at sea in 1852. During the “cranberry craze” of the mid-1800s, when almost all lowland was converted into berry harvesting, this area’s seven and a half bog acres were in production. Deeded upland provided sand, firewood, later cleared for a pig farm. The patchwork totals 153 acres abutting 900 acres the town bought in the 1980s called the Punkhorn. It also sat in the “zone of contribution” for town wells serving Dennis just over the line.
The main agent was Brewster’s Conservation Commission, although the Dennis Water District chipped in $1 million to protect its assets, and the town’s private trust joined the public investment. Given the quilt of ownership, deals needed to come one by one, beginning in 2006, culminating in 2020. The alternative was clear; one 50-acre parcel, with a bog, had a 20-lot subdivision ready to roll out.
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Holding a Compact together for 35 years is no small feat. Robinson has been the constant; avoiding major overhead or debt (the Brewster Conservation Trust owns the Hay home where Robinson works, for example) has been smart. The Compact has never had more than a couple of employees besides Robinson; each Trust or Foundation provides periodic people power.
Multiple attempts to copy the Compact’s structure have had mixed success, and Robinson thinks he understands why:
“There was no fairy dust here, no top-down grants, no big national group showing up and offering $100,000 to build the organization. I’ve seen that happen many times and for the most part those have folded.”
The only folding here is into each Cape town for 35 years, parcel by parcel, deal by deal.
NEXT: The evocative, empty halls of the State House.
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Thank you Compact!
Wonderful article. Please save all the land you can. Thank you.