ABSTRACT
During the twentieth century, state and municipal governments in the United States witnessed an ongoing conversion of agricultural land and other forms of open space to metropolitan uses. As Morris (1998) notes, “Since 1957, every state has responded to development pressures by allowing or requiring preferential property tax treatment of farmland, and in some states other open space land…. [T]he most common policy assesses the land at its value in its current agricultural or open space use.” Such policies are known as current use (or use–value) assessment. With the sole exception of Michigan, every state employs some form of a current use assessment program (American Farmland Trust 1997). The literature is replete with works that assess the potential impacts of such programs on landowners and land conservation (e.g., Anderson 1986, 1993; Bentick 1979; Bentick and Pogue 1988; Lopez et al. 1988).
