Candia’s Sanborn Farm on Chester Road is being protected from development now that the owner of the land has been granted legal protection through an easement on the land.

Although some Candia officials are against the easement on Sanborn Farm, decisions from the previous Board of Selectmen required the current board to honor the commitment to grant the easement.

Owner Arthur Sanborn, the fifth generation of the family to live in the farmhouse across the street from the newly protected property, currently leases the land to farmers. He also runs a shop across the street, selling building and maintenance supplies.

The terms of the easement, which would be held by the Rockingham County Conservation District, would make sure that no structure will ever stand on the property unless it has a specifically agricultural purpose, and that the area will not be mined. The land, located on Chester Road, cannot be used for residential or commercial purposes.

Sanborn said he has agreed to allow certain activities, such as snowmobiling and hunting on the property, provided the land doesn’t get ripped up. He said his first thought after deciding to sell the land was to get an easement on it.

“I could have put a sign out there and sold it the next day to a developer,” he said. “I spent hours and hours working in that field, and I would die if there were houses on it.”

The 49-acre Sanborn property is one of only two remaining areas in Candia listed as having prime agricultural soils, according to a local resource protection priorities map by the Southern New Hampshire Planning Commission.

The other one is the Nutting property on Patten Hill Road.

The cooperative agreement to grant the easement was signed in June 2006. After wrangling over whether the matter required a public hearing and conferring with town counsel, Candia selectmen told the Conservation Commission to go ahead with the easement and accepted the funding from the Farm and Ranch Land Protection program.

The Conservation Commission will purchase the building rights on the Sanborn property for $595,000, paying in yearly installments of $116,000, and Farm and Land Ranch Protection will reimburse 55 percent of the total for the easement, or $327,250.

At a selectmen’s meeting in December, Selectman Rick Lazott said he felt the easement was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“I don’t like buying development rights. I don’t think it’s fair to the taxpayer,” said Lazott, also the selectmen’s representative to the Conservation Commission.

In getting the easement, the town has effectively paid Sanborn to keep his property with certain restrictions, Lazott said.

No additional money will be raised through taxes said the commission’s vice chairman, Betsey Kruse, although the fund is built on taxes from past years.

Lazott said less tax revenue will be generated by the farm because the tax assessment on the entire Sanborn homestead will now exclude that 49-acre piece.

He said the question of purchasing the easement should have been put to voters again at the 2007 Town Meeting, but added that state conservation law doesn’t operate that way.

“Once you give them the money, they have control over it,” Lazott said.

One of the possible solutions raise was that the Conservation Commission could secure a deed restriction on the land that would prevent development, but Kruse said the easement was the best way because such land trusts are consistently monitored by the state.

“It effectively is the most permanent way we have of protecting land,” Kruse said.