Leslie Ratley-Beach Joins Alliance Staff

We are delighted to announce that Leslie Ratley-Beach has joined the Alliance staff as our Easement Defense Director. Leslie’s extensive legal and program experience with conservation easements at the Vermont Land Trust will be a great asset for our community. She will help us address the tough challenges of IRS audits of easements, condemnation of easements, and potential insurance for easements. Leslie is an attorney and has served on numerous land trust advisory committees.

Leslie has long been a part of the land conservation family. She has served on the 2004 Standards and Practices revision committee and the stewardship excellence committee, instructed at our Land Conservation Leadership Program, and presented numerous trainings at Rally since 2003. She worked with our education team in authoring the Curriculum Course on Managing Conservation Easements in Perpetuity and has instructed on this topic as well.

Leslie has worked with the Vermont Land Trust for almost 13 years, most recently as stewardship director leading the program responsible for more than 1430 conservation easements on over 470,000 acres of land with more 1300 landowners. Prior to that, she was project counsel with VLT where she drafted and helped negotiate more than 400 conservation easements. In both of those capacities she led teams of professionals delivering conservation services to landowners and other staff. Leslie is the author of two articles in the Alliance’s Exchange on Landowner Relationships (spring 2002 co-authored with Darby Bradley and Barbara Wagner) and Costs of Easement Stewardship (fall 2002).

She has a law degree from Boston University and practiced real estate law for nine years in Boston before joining VLT in 1994. Leslie served as an appointee of the Governor of Vermont on a statewide collaboration regarding off road recreation vehicle use. Leslie has Bachelors degrees from University of Oregon in journalism and political science.

A native of the Cascade Mountain region of California, she makes her home in Montpelier, Vermont with husband Bob and their three felines. They love to ski, hike, camp and photograph Vermont’s special places.

Leslie will begin her work for the Alliance on August 13. After that date, she may be reached at lrbeach@lta.org. She looks forward to working with all of you on these issues of permanence, which are so critical to the success of our work.

posted 7/18/07