Local Governments
The hardest part about conservation?
Spending the budget.
You fought to secure funding for conservation, and now everyone has a plan for it. What happens next matters more than it might seem, because your first few decisions set the tone for the whole program.
We help you turn a budget into a strategy. We work out which land matters most, advise on which deals to pass on, and coordinate the work as the program unfolds.
At West Branch, we understand.
We’ve talked to enough councils to know that once the budget passes, there’s no playbook for what comes next. The temptation is to treat the proposals on your desk as the strategy. Say yes to a few that look reasonable, and the budget can be half gone with nothing tying the decisions together.
Build the plan first, and every proposal that comes in gets measured against it.
Raleigh West, the principal of West Branch, has run the South Carolina Conservation Bank, the largest public source of land-protection funding in the state. We know where county money goes furthest, and how to stretch it by pairing local funds with state, federal, and philanthropic sources.
How do we spend without waste?
A conservation budget is easy to spend and hard to spend well. A few ways to tell a real program from a string of one-off deals:
Start from what matters
Before you look at proposals, decide what land matters most: water sources, working farms, whatever fits your county’s priorities. The plan flows from that.
Build a sequence
Decide what to pursue, in what order, and what to turn down. Dollars spent deliberately go further than dollars spent on a first-come, first-served basis.
Measure proposals against your plan
For each opportunity, ask two questions: Does it move the plan forward, and is now the right time to act on it?
Keep decisions defensible
Write down the reason behind each decision, so the council, the press, and the public can see why the money went where it did.
Reach out to explore.
If you’ve been thinking about what happens to the land,
let’s talk about your situation and your options.
