The Albert Lea school board decided to reject a donation of land from The Nature Conservancy at its Monday meeting.

Board members cited safety concerns and anxieties from adjacent property owners as reasons they wouldn’t want the district in charge of the land.

Chris Chalmers, director of Community Education, said he talked with the Freeborn County Sheriff’s Office, which agreed it would enforce rules if the school district wanted to post signs deterring illegal activity.

Board member Jill Marin said she’d heard of deer stands on the property and of parties where litter was left behind. The site is not managed by anyone, as The Nature Conservancy has no offices nearby.

“I can see managing but the monitoring part is where I have a huge concern,” Marin said.

Board Vice Chairman Mark Ciota said he visited the property and talked to adjacent landowners. He said that since it would be a small number of students served by programming at the property that the board should consider the opinions of nearby property owners.

Board member Kim Nelson said she thought Chalmers answered the board’s concerns and said she was excited about the idea of a nonprofit donation and the opportunity for the district. Member Jeshua Erickson said he was struggling with the idea that the board wouldn’t want the donation because of something that could happen.

“I lost interest in the property from the safety standpoint of it being on Highway 13,” member Bill Leland said.

No one made a motion to approve the donation, so there was no vote.

A representative of The Nature Conservancy had attended a board meeting in November to explain why they’d like to donate the parcel of land. The organization is looking to focus on preserving larger pieces of land and is working to find way to gift smaller pieces of land, like this 15-acre tract west of Highway 13 a few miles south of Interstate 90.

Scott Hanna is the Community Education environmental program coordinator, and he and Chalmers said there are many benefits to accepting the land if it’s donated. Chalmers was at the Monday meeting, though Hanna was not present, and said if the school board doesn’t want the tract of land that The Nature Conservancy would continue to look for an entity that would make it available for public access.

The school board heard opposition to the donation at a January meeting by Albert Lea resident Hugh O’Byrne, who said the school would have too many liabilities with owning the land. Lori Volz, the district’s director of finance and operations, said she checked with the insurance company and accepting the land would have very little effect on the district’s payments.

The land was deeded to The Nature Conservancy in 1973 as the Paul N. Nelson and G. Myrtle Nelson Wildlife Sanctuary. The deed includes a clause that the land should be made available to organizations interested in nature studies and observations and that if it’s no longer used for that purpose it should revert back to Paul Nelson or his descendants.

Hanna has previously said that the property only would be used to help people understand and respect the environment. His hope was that it could be used to teach small groups “leave no trace” camping, which teaches people to leave a place untouched or improved after visiting it.