More than 600 acres on Mill Mountain will be placed under conservation easements though an agreement with Roanoke City Council, Gov. Tim Kaine announced Thursday afternoon.

Kaine made the announcement from the observation deck beneath the Mill Mountain Star during a speech touting the Virginia Outdoors Foundation's addition of 17,000 acres to its list of land placed under easements.

Roanoke Mayor David Bowers, VOF Executive Director Bob Lee, Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Preston Bryant and Janet Scheid, president of Western Virginia Land Trust, also spoke.

Kaine said the council hopes to complete the easements by the end of the year. Although the mountain is already listed on the National Register of Historic Places and has a restrictive deed covenant, the easements would provide further protection.

Roanoke Councilman Rupert Cutler will lead the efforts to establish the two permanent easements with a goal of finishing the process this year.

This could affect about 600 acres of land on the mountain, according to a news release from the governor's office.

"The only questionable acreage is right up here on the summit," Cutler said, citing the roughly 20-acre area that has been developed into a city park with a zoo, visitors center and the mountain's signature 80-foot star.

How that portion of the mountain would be affected is still unclear, but he said the city council would be consulting with the Mill Mountain Advisory Committee to determine where the boundaries of the easement will fall.

In 2007, Valley Forward, a Roanoke civic group, proposed building an inn or restaurant on top of the mountain as well, but that effort appears to have stalled in the wake of a political backlash against the plan.

Cutler said he conceived a plan 10 years ago to advocate conservation easements as a means of protecting Mill Mountain, but said these new Mill Mountain easements were initiated by the governor's office and received unanimous support from the city council.

In 2006, Kaine established a goal of preserving 400,000 acres of open space by the end of the decade.

"We pedaled the bicycle really hard and we are now on the verge of making it," he told a crowd of about 200 people.

Afterward Kaine estimated the current acreage preserved at "somewhere over 350,000."

He said he was including in that total the roughly 45,000 acres preserved during fiscal year 2006, which fell in the final six months of Gov. Mark Warner's term.

"We'll start it from the beginning of the '06 fiscal year to the end of the decade," he said, adding, "The only real measure we had when we set the goal was fiscal years."

Kaine said he believed the total land preserved would rise to about 410,000 acres by the upcoming gubernatorial inauguration.

A news release said deeds for about 25,000 acres of Virginia Outdoors Foundation easements had been recorded this year, but noted that 78,000 acres have been approved by the foundation and their deeds are expected to be recorded over the next several weeks.

"Roanoke has been our star city when it comes to conservation easements," Kaine told the crowd. Last year the Roanoke City Council unanimously voted to place an easement on more than half of the 12,000 acres in Carvins Cove Natural Reserve.

In his remarks, Bowers said the council would soon set its sights on making similar arrangements for Roanoke Mountain, which he said was owned by the city but under a 99-year lease to the Blue Ridge Parkway.