With the last graduation ceremony at Cazenovia College completed, I, like many of you, have been thinking about what will transpire when the college officially closes its doors. The closing of the college and the re-purposing of the campus will have enormous impacts for our community. Many land trusts, especially those with extensive service areas, cannot or do not participate in planning at the community scale. CPF, on the other hand, has a long history of involvement in community-level planning, perhaps resulting from the organization’s early focus on preserving the historic village.

In 2021, CPF was awarded funding through The Nature Conservancy of New York’s Resilient and Connected Network (RCN) Planning, Capacity & Strategy Grant Program to update its 2012 Strategic Land Conservation Plan (SLCP) and bring Geographic Information Systems (GIS) capacity in-house. In 2022, CPF hired professional planner and Cazenovia resident, Jennifer Marotto Lutter, to complete the plan. The SLCP is intended to help CPF focus its conservation efforts and understand how best to prioritize property protection to achieve broad conservation goals.

When the property now known as the Burlingame Meadow was listed for sale in 2015, CPF launched a capital campaign, raising most of the funds needed to purchase the property to provide parking and permanent public access to the trails. Most of the purchase was made possible through generous gifts from neighbors and CPF Members and CPF financed the remainder with a small mortgage, which represents CPF’s only debt obligation today.

We are thrilled to share the exciting news that CPF has purchased 27.5 acres of undeveloped land with 470 feet of road frontage on US Route 20, west of the Village of Cazenovia.