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Cash CowsTo the Editor, Regarding Emil Franzi's "The Great Arizona Rent-A-Cow Conspiracy" (May 13): A number of years ago, a bill was introduced at the state Legislature after an uproar created by the revelation that Charles Keating and Kemper Marley were paying only a few hundred dollars in taxes on multi-million-dollar land holdings that were classified as agricultural use, as a result of a few strategically placed cows.
Proposed legislation would have also required that landowners granted this suppressed valuation category who then later developed the land would be subject to higher taxes retroactively. Unfortunately, some last-minute legislative legerdemain resulted in a weak bill passing that did nothing about the underlying problem. Given the increased awareness of the linkage between growth subsidies and mounting fiscal pressure of local government, renewed efforts to enact these provisions would be timely. --Doug Koppinger
As a veteran of the "rent-a-cow" wars of the '80s, I enjoyed Emil Franzi's "The Great Arizona Rent-A-Cow Conspiracy" (May 13). In Arnold Jeffers' time, the issue was simple fairness. Today, though, there's increased awareness of how closely tied these statutes are to the economics of growth.
Like most treatments of the subject, however, Franzi's discourse
is more critical than remedial. He's not to be faulted for this,
since no one else has cracked the problem either, but after There's one approach my experience has taught me to avoid and a second I'd recommend. The approach that won't work is to restructure the agricultural valuation statutes in the vain belief that there is some objective test to distinguish "legitimate" and "illegitimate" uses. There is no such test, and the attempt to find one is what doomed the reform efforts of the last decade. The fact is that "legitimate" ranchers have more in common with tax-sheltering developers than we like to think: neither uses grazing land to its highest and best use; both are capable of running operations that are profitable; and both engage in ranching, in part, to protect an anticipated future return of their investment in land. Without insight into the intentions of their souls, there's no practical means to tell them apart. However, I think there is a means by which a declaration of those intentions can be forced, and that's the zoning code. Franzi alludes to this solution by suggesting that grazing status be pulled when land is rezoned for development. Having gone this far, though, it might make more sense to simply establish agriculture as a zoned use in the same way we maintain land use controls for residential, commercial and industrial property. Of course, we can't do this now. The enabling statutes which authorize local government to establish zoning codes specifically exempt agricultural uses. But, if a legislative or initiative battle has to be fought, it might as well be for something that has a chance to work. --Rick Lyons Pima County Assessor
Up In ArmsTo the Editor, Having read, over the years, most of Jeff Smith's columns in The Weekly, it is now clear to me that one of his and The Weekly's highest priorities is to get a rise out of readers, whatever it takes. To make statements so outrageous and oversimplified as he did in "Pistol Grip" (May 6) can lead to no other conclusions. Let me get this right, Jeff. "We keep our guns. We keep our freedom" means that the most important aspect of the freedom we love is the right to possess weapons whose sole purpose is to kill humans? That any restrictions on gun ownership make us less free? That we are head-and-shoulders more "free" than other Western democratic nations (supposedly envious of us) that have significantly lower murder rates but more stringent gun restrictions? "The rest of the world most often does not understand the mind-set of free Americans." Say what? Am I and the millions of others who are sick of the proliferation of handguns not of a free mind-set? Then Smith acts as if there is some seamless segue between gun control and birth control. "At the root of every ill of modern life...lies overpopulation." Really? How about offering a shred of support for such a statement. Were there no problems in North America 100 to 300 years ago when the continent was sparsely populated? Drunk driving and child abuse, just to pick a couple of easy whipping boys, are due to overpopulation? What's most irksome is that the usually reasonable Smith grossly oversimplifies two complicated issues (even I will admit that stricter gun control alone will not solve our violence problem), thus putting him on a par with the multitude of talk-show callers and ethnocentric, so-called free Americans for whom there are no gray areas. --Peter Bourque
Thanks to Jeff Smith for "Pistol Grip" (May 6), in which he states, "at the root of every ill of modern life...lies overpopulation." I was surprised to see this statement in print. There are many organizations whose goal is to obtain power over an ever-increasing number of subjects, and these powerful groups are usually successful at preventing the publication of this undeniable fact. They promote the "reduce, re-use, recycle" program which is akin to sticking Band-Aids over severed arteries--the patient may live a while longer, but will still die from the wounds. The amount of land, water and air is constant; it is our population that is changing, and those of us who work against this change (e.g. by limiting family size to two or fewer children) are probably just pissing in the wind. --C. C. Goddard We Want Letters! Thrilled by our brilliant insights? Sick of our mean-spirited attacks? Need to make something perfectly clear? Write: tucsonweekly@tucsonweekly.com
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The proposed law would have required that in order to receive
the benefit of the greatly reduced agricultural land value assessment,
the landowner's primary source of income would have to be from
the kind of agricultural activity they were claiming (e.g. grazing).