How Preservation Grants Choose Winners in Chester County

Many people in Chester County say they want to protect open space. They want the drive home to feel like they still live somewhere open and comfortable. They mean trails and farms that keep the county from turning into one long strip mall. What most people don’t realize is that open space doesn’t get protected simply because it’s beautiful or because residents agree it should be. It gets protected because someone wins a grant, and the grant system is less like a feel-good community gesture and more like a competitive contest with rules, scorecards, and deadlines.

The first surprise is that individual homeowners can’t apply to protect the field behind their neighborhood, even if every family on the street signs a petition. The list of eligible applicants is small: municipalities like townships and boroughs, nonprofit land trusts such as Natural Lands, Willistown Conservation Trust, Brandywine Conservancy, and the county itself. That means the average resident’s desire to preserve a view or create a trail only becomes “real” when it flows through an organization that can actually submit the paperwork, negotiate with landowners, and carry the application from an idea to an award. That’s why two neighbors can live five miles apart and have totally different experiences of “open space”; one town seems to add trails and protect land every few years, and another feels like it’s always losing ground, not because the second town cares less, but because it isn’t in the game the same way.

Once you understand that, the next surprise is how “brutally practical” the scoring really is. These grants aren’t handed out. They reward projects that can show public benefit on paper and prove value to the environment in a way that fits the scoring categories. If a township can show that a project will be used by a lot of people because it’s near where people actually live, and it connects into existing trails or parks, it tends to score well. If a project is ecologically rich like wetlands, woodlands, streams, or rare habitat—it tends to score well. If a project has matching money, land donations, and formal partnerships, it tends to score even better. And if a project is ready, meaning the seller is willing, the appraisal and survey work is lined up, and the application looks like it can move quickly if funded, it starts to feel like a responsibility to the people awarding the grant.

The system naturally favors municipalities that are organized enough to apply again and again, wealthy enough to bring matching funds, and politically aligned enough to prioritize open space as a real budget line instead of an idea. If a township has a dedicated open space fund or has passed a referendum that sets aside money for preservation and parks, it can actually buy into the grant game. If a township has staff, consultants, or a partner land trust that knows how to assemble a clean application, it’s playing an entirely different game than a township that is trying to do it from scratch with volunteers and a part-time administration.

That’s why certain towns seem to keep winning.

Open space isn’t free. If your township isn’t applying consistently, isn’t partnered with a land trust, or isn’t building the kind of public record that shows community support local fields and future trails are simply less likely to rise to the top. The difference between “we should preserve this” and “this is preserved” comes down to whether residents show up early enough to push their township to play the game.

Let’s move Pennsylvania forward.