ANNAPOLIS — A 27-acre stretch of farmland, woods and Breton Bay shoreline in St. Mary’s County will stay that way permanently under a conservation easement the state Board of Public Works approved Oct. 29.
The easement, in the Mattapany Rural Legacy Area, protects agricultural and forested land, waterfront on Breton Bay in the Potomac River watershed and the scenic views along Breton Beach Road, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources said. Southern Maryland Resource Conservation and Development Inc., the nonprofit that runs the county’s Rural Legacy program, received the funding to buy it.
A conservation easement does not change who owns the land. The owner keeps it and can keep farming or managing the woods, but gives up the right to subdivide and develop it, a restriction that runs with the deed forever. Along Breton Bay, the estuary that runs south from Leonardtown to the Potomac, that means one more piece of shoreline that will not become a subdivision.
How the money breaks down
The board approved $576,000 in Rural Legacy money on Oct. 29 for two easements: the St. Mary’s property and an 85-acre easement in Dorchester County’s Harriet Tubman Rural Legacy Area along the Transquaking River. DNR’s announcement did not say how much of that total goes to the Breton Bay parcel, and the per-property amounts are listed only in the board’s meeting agenda.
The same meeting brought a much larger, separate decision: $21 million in fiscal 2027 Rural Legacy grant awards to 19 Rural Legacy Areas statewide, meant to protect more than 4,240 acres. Those are program allocations, not purchases. Each individual easement bought with the money must return to the board for approval later, as the Breton Bay deal did this week. The $21 million combines a fiscal 2026 appropriation, a fiscal 2027 appropriation and about $3.3 million in redirected funds from earlier years, according to the Board of Public Works agenda.
Rural Legacy and Program Open Space are paid for mainly with dedicated revenue from the state’s property transfer tax, the tax charged when real estate changes hands. The board is made up of Gov. Wes Moore, Treasurer Dereck E. Davis and Comptroller Brooke E. Lierman.
A buffer that grew around Pax River
The Mattapany Rural Legacy Area dates to 2006. It was drawn largely to keep land around Naval Air Station Patuxent River and its Webster Outlying Field rural, limiting the kind of housing and commercial growth that can lead to conflicts with flight operations, according to a state military compatibility case study.
The area was expanded in 2017, and in October 2022 the Rural Legacy Board added another 17,065 acres, almost doubling the boundary to take in land along the St. Mary’s and Potomac rivers and around Webster Field, the county said at the time. Southern Maryland Resource Conservation and Development requested that expansion with the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County’s support.
The program has used a cost-sharing model in which the Navy, through the Defense Department’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program, has paid half of easement prices on qualifying properties, with the state and county splitting the rest, the case study said. DNR’s announcement did not say whether Navy money is part of the Breton Bay easement.
Part of a busy season for land deals
The Breton Bay approval is the latest in a string of state land-preservation votes touching Southern Maryland. Earlier this month the board sent money to a fire boat, splash pads and forest land in the region, and the state funded a forest easement and an addition to Doncaster in Charles County.
St. Mary’s has also been rethinking its own preservation tools. In September the Chronicle reported that the county leans on a fee-in-lieu instead of private sales of development rights under its transferable development rights system.
Breton Bay itself has drawn restoration work beyond land deals, including a volunteer oyster planting effort this summer. Shoreline that stays forested or farmed generally sends less runoff into the bay than developed land, one reason the state ranks waterfront and wetlands among the resources Rural Legacy is meant to protect.
Elsewhere on Oct. 29, the board approved about $4 million in Program Open Space local grants for 14 projects and $4.12 million for the state to buy 2,188 forested acres in Somerset County. St. Mary’s was among nine counties named in DNR’s announcement of park and land conservation grants, with the Breton Bay easement as its listed project. More detail on each item is in the board’s Oct. 29 agenda, and DNR posts results of each meeting on its land news page.
