The Donor Who Helped Himself (cont'd)

“Hi, Brad,” chirped Sam, as he opened the stout oak double doors to his cottage. “What’s happening with you on this gorgeous fall day?”

“Hi, Sam, glad we could get together today.” And after the chit-chat had proceeded for a while, Brad got to the point.

“Sam, can you tell me the history of this parcel of land you want to place in the unitrust?”

“Sure, this piece has a history that only the oldest people around here know about. You wouldn’t believe it by the way things look today, but there used to be a car dealership on that land. That’s how I happened to get hold of it. It was the first car dealership in these parts, and it sold the old Model T’s to lots of folks around here prior to 1930 when it closed. Actually the town’s center was located more over here to the west than it is today. The way it developed through the last fifty years has brought it more to the east where the Interstate runs, but over here was where the town began back in 1855, just before the Civil War.

“Later, when the dealership was long out of existence, it became an eyesore and the property was in a very undesirable condition. That’s when my father bought the whole parcel and later had the place bulldozed and converted back into farmland. Everybody thanked him for removing the old place and thought his idea to farm it was great. I inherited it from him ten years ago when he died and it’s been sitting there every since. It’s not much to look at, because I haven’t rented it out to farmers, just let it lie fallow. But now nature’s taken it over and it looks much like it probably did back when the town was founded.”

Now Brad’s temples began to throb. He knew what was likely to happen; he would have to insist that Sam do both level one and level two testing sequences. That old dealership had probably resulted in considerable oil and gas being drained into the soil and that was going to be a headache. All of a sudden, Brad could see why Sam had structured the gift in this way – he wanted to get the tax deduction for the land and he wanted to charge ahead and put the land in the trust where nobody could touch it for cleanup. Donative intent was only a partial motive; self protection was the other half of the reason Sam was so eager to make this gift.

Brad’s experience with many gifts over the years suggested that donative intent was inversely proportional to the trouble he would have getting the gift completed. He could see that in this situation there would probably be a great deal of trouble. Well, there goes the quarter’s gift report figures, he thought. Right down the drain!