Horizon Farms
Several years ago, Robert McGinley was jolted by an urgent plea from his father, William.
The elder McGinley owned a successful electronics company, giving him and his wife Jane the ability in 1981 to buy Horizon Farms, a hilly and wooded 402-acre slice of equestrian heaven nestled in Barrington Hills.
Robert McGinley said his parents bought the property with a vision; a preservation mindset. They believed open space, country living and an equestrian lifestyle benefited the small community in which they lived and were actively involved.
“That’s why they bought it, that’s how they used it, and that’s how they wanted it to stay,” Robert said.
Horizon Farms will stay that way forever, thanks to the Barrington Area Conservation Trust, which helped make the property one of the largest successful private land preservation efforts in Illinois.
But that almost wasn’t the case.
In December 2000, Robert McGinley was splitting his time between the family farm and his home in Southern California, where he is a film producer. It was then, Robert said, that his father — worried about the farm’s future — grabbed him by the lapels and made his plea.
“You have to get more involved with the farm,” the father said. Three weeks later, William McGinley died. Suddenly, Robert and his two siblings, James and Margaret McGinley, were forced to consider the near-term fate of their family’s land.
For the next two years, Robert searched for a way to balance his parents’ vision – that Horizon Farms remain an enclave of vast, open, horse-friendly land – with the financial responsibility that came with owning such a prized asset in the sprawling Chicago suburbs.
When his mother died in 2003, Robert was ready to give up his search. Developers had come calling, he said, and it appeared Horizon Farms was set to grow homes, not crops. Then, the three McGinley siblings were introduced to the Barrington Area Conservation Trust and the idea that a conservation easement could solve their dilemma.
A landowner who creates a conservation easement agrees to restrict development on the land. Once agreed to, the easement is recorded on the property’s deed and is administered by trustees of qualified private organization, like the Barrington Area Conservation Trust, or by a government agency.
The easement remains in force regardless of who owns the land.
McGinley said a conservation easement turned out to be the balance between his desire to preserve his parents’ vision and his fiscal responsibilities to the surviving McGinley family members.
“There are three fiscal benefits to a conservation easement,” he said. “The first, and most important, is that the land still remains the property of the landowner. It’s still an asset that can be sold down the road.
“The second benefit comes from that,” he said. “If it’s sold, it’s sold at a retail price, not the wholesale price developers would offer.”
The third benefit, McGinley said, is tax relief. Land-use restrictions shift the land’s value. This, in many cases, can lead to a property tax reduction.
The three McGinley family members agreed that this was the way to go, Robert said. The Barrington Area Conservation Trust, he said, made it all possible.
The group pooled resources, including those of the Naperville-based Conservation Foundation, a similar organization that works to protect land on a regional level, to make the Horizon Farms preservation effort a reality, McGinley said.
“I don’t mind saying that my family was skeptical,” he said. “They were skeptical about the easement’s ability to provide these benefits. Mary Bradford-White (Board President of BACTrust) was instrumental in helping erase that skepticism. She brought in the right people, and we were able to come up with a strategy that meets our fiduciary responsibilities and also meets our desire to preserve open space.”
Working with the Trust, the family crafted an easement plan that, while allowing for the construction of eight homes sometime in the future, keeps most of Horizon Farms free from development.
“By preserving Horizon Farm’s rural beauty and character, the McGinley family has created a wonderful living legacy for our community,” Bradford-White said. “They (developers) could have come in and built some 80 homes on that property, and when it was over, it would have looked like just another big suburb.”
Bradford-White said her organization’s goal is to convince others that the sound decisions made by the McGinley’s can be repeated by landowners throughout Barrington Hills and the surrounding communities.
McGinley, who now holds an advisory board member position with the Trust, couldn’t agree with that goal more.
“We wanted to make a statement,” he said. “We wanted to say, ‘We’re ready to take a stand against suburban encroachment.’”
He continued, “We wanted to provide a legacy to my grandchildren, to give them and everyone else an enclave of open space so that they can experience something that’s becoming more and more rare.”
The McGinleys sold the property to Meryl Squires-Cannon in 2006, and it still remains as an undeveloped equestrian farm today.