I flew out of Albany, New York, the other day. It was nice and clear and you could look down and see the sprawl – the ordered, grid-like subdivisions from the 1950s immediately around the airport giving way to the curvy, more modern patterns of development as the land got more rural. Supposedly these new subdivisions are an improvement, as the lots are bigger and more “natural,” but from the air I found their bigger footprints more depressing. Here you had maybe 30 people living on 50 acres, instead of 800 people, and out in the country, where you could still see remnants of the farms and forest the sprawl was replacing, it was easy to do the math and imagine McMansions and honeysuckle and Norway maple hedgerows as far as the eye could see.
When I was young, I looked at these subdivisions and got mad at the developers. With age came wisdom – at least surrounding this issue – and today I look at what caused the landowner to develop in the first place. When you do this, the economics of farms and forestland conversion become very apparent. And in the vast majority of cases there’s no villain. There’s no greedy landowner; no cartoonish heartless developer who goes home at night and swims in a pool full of gold coins. There’s just the plain economic reality that we don’t live in an agrarian society anymore, and working farms and forests can’t pay the tax bill. An example: in the town of Shelburne, Vermont, right outside of Burlington, land was valued at $6,255 an acre in 2006; at that rate, the tax bill on a 100-acre parcel was $11,720 a year. If you were growing nice sawtimber on that 100 acres, maybe you could harvest once every 20 years and make close to that amount, while in the intervening years you would have paid out close to a quarter of a million dollars in taxes.
If you can’t break even on your land through farming or forestry, then it’s going to get developed.
I grew up and still live in Vermont, so this is the state I’m most familiar with. And the good news is that our legislature tackled this problem head on in the 1970s. The resulting legislation created the Use Value Appraisal (UVA) program – better known as Current Use – which taxes the land on its value as a working farm or forest, not on its development potential. (Each state in the Northeast has some version of this program, though the details vary.) If the owner of that theoretical 100-acre forest in Shelburne had been enrolled in Current Use, the tax bill would have been $267 a year – an amount they could earn with the timber. Put bluntly, Current Use is a big reason, maybe THE big reason, why Vermont is still a mostly rural state.
Today the program is undergoing a high level of scrutiny – some would say it’s under attack. The old-timers who’ve been promoting the program since the beginning say this happened once before in the 1990s, but I’m too young to remember a time when Current Use was anything but bi-partisan and non-controversial. Over the past 10 years it’s been the rare piece of legislation that both Republicans and Democrats, environmentalists and those in the forest products industry agree is critical and good.
This is changing, though. Mix the fact that Vermont is becoming more urban and disconnected from working farms and forests with a budget shortfall, sprinkle in some of the class politics that are all the rage these days, and you have a recipe for discontent. A recent op-ed by a Burlington real estate appraiser argued that the program is a tax give-away to rich people and that the subsidies should be less generous, means tested, and capped in rich towns; this presumably in support of a draft Senate bill that would limit benefits for high-value parcels of land. Those of us who support the program will rally to its defense and point out that it’s a trade, not a give away, and that standing timber doesn’t require sewer lines or social services or paved roads or schools, so why on earth would you tax it like a residential building lot, and that the $75 per year the program “costs” each Vermonter is a small investment in the $3 billion per year our pretty rural landscape generates through timber and farming and tourism. (Read this to learn more). But the scary thing is that most people don’t understand the program. And it’s very easy to begrudge the rich. And, even in Vermont, there are probably many more urban voters with urban values than rural voters who value trees or cornfields. So it’s not hard to imagine a legislator who represents this first group hungrily eyeing the $45 million the state spends reimbursing towns for the lost tax revenue and thinking it could be better spent on a new public school or a shiny swimming pool.
Over the next few years, it’s going to be very important that conservationists band together to defend this program and explain why it’s so important. And here’s the point that I don’t think is being made loudly enough. Current Use is NOT an open lands program; it’s a WORKING LANDS program. This is its genius. It’s not subsidizing rich landowners so they can sit on their back decks and drink toddies and enjoy the view; it’s roping them in and tying them to the working land tradition in Vermont. I’ve gotten a half-dozen calls in my tenure here from forest landowners, new to the area, who tell me that they want to be enrolled in Current Use and get the tax break but don’t want to harvest timber. And I tell them forget it. That’s the point of the program. The state is using it to encourage working lands – to keep loggers and foresters employed, and equipment manufacturers and coffee shops and sawmills open – but more brilliantly, it’s using the program to ensure that the woods are being managed responsibly. Everybody who enrolls has to hire a forester (barring the handful who train to be foresters themselves) and everybody has to have a forest management plan that conforms to best management practices. Without Current Use, people can hack away at their forests however they want, be it through ignorance or greed. But this program is a form of defacto forest certification. It’s ensuring that two million acres of forestland are being managed with an eye on the future.
People can begrudge the rich their money all they want, but if you believe that Vermont’s working landscape is valuable – and supposedly 97 percent of us do – you can’t begrudge the way they’re managing their land. Whether someone’s a grocery bagger with a 25-acre family woodlot or an absentee stock broker who owns 5,000 acres adjacent to his vacation home, through the Current Use program they’re both tree farmers and both contributing to the rural economy. If you weaken the program, there will be more subdivisions and more high-graded forests. There’s just no way around that. In the latter case, you’re setting the forest back 100 years. In the former, you’re losing it forever.
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