SCIENCE@home

Outlook: Budget cuts threaten the Williamson Act, California's longstanding farmland protection program

A. Sokolow

Published 2010 in California Agriculture

ABSTRACT

Thousands of California farmers and ranchers, owning about half of all the agricultural acres in California, have their properties enrolled in the Williamson Act. Many of them and others are worried about the continuity of the 45-year-old, state-local government program that restricts the conversion of farms and ranches to urban uses by providing property-tax reductions to landowners. At issue is the elimination in the state budget of the subventions (fiscal aid) that compensate counties for all or a part of their property-tax losses. Intense lobbying by agricultural and other groups has opened up the possibility that subventions could be restored in the 2010-11 state budget as a temporary measure, pending agreement on a permanent way to fund the program that does not rely on the state’s general fund. The problem is rooted in the current fiscal crisis that overwhelms both state and county governments. This is not the first time that Williamson Act subventions have been threatened by budget shortfalls, but with a continuing state government deficit of about $20 billion and big funding gaps for counties, the current crisis is the most severe since the state began paying subventions in 1971. Even without the subventions, the core part of the program — long-term contracts between landowners and county governments and a few cities that link land restrictions to property-tax benefits — could continue to exist. The landownercounty contractual relationship is legally independent of the state-county fiscal relationship. But in practice, the two processes are closely connected. For if they permanently lose fiscal support, most counties probably would reluctantly exit from the program by not renewing existing contracts to gain back the foregone property-tax revenues. As Outlook

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2010

  • Venue

    California Agriculture

  • Publication date

    2010-07-01

  • Fields of study

    Agricultural and Food Sciences, Law, Biology

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.3733/CA.V064N03P118
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

  • No references are available for this paper.

Showing 0-0 of 0 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-5 of 5 citing papers · Page 1 of 1