FIFTH NATIONAL CONSERVATION CONGRESS 143 



of running our forest towns is increasing very rapidly with the problem of 

 highways and other improvements until last year in some of the towns we paid 

 as high as fifteen cents an acre in taxes. We are therefore very much interested 

 in this subject. Naturally, as the report was being read I was endeavoring to 

 apply it to our conditions and I would like to ask the gentleman who made the 

 report how the plan which your committee has recommended through fixing a 

 constant value over a series of years in the town where the woodland owner was 

 paying 75 or 80 per cent of all the taxes would operate to relieve the tax payer. 

 In other words, it takes two things to make your taxes, valuation and a rate. 

 If the valuation is kept down, naturally the rate must go up, a certain sum of 

 money must be raised every year to support the government in these forest towns 

 and I rise principally to ask for the benefit of suffering New York State wood- 

 land owners, if the Committee can inform us whether this plan which is so clearly 

 recommended, can be applied to the towns where the condition I have stated exists. 



Mr. E. T. Allen, of Oregon: This proposition was that the timber owner 

 was now paying upon both land and timber and we suggested paying it upon 

 the land but deferring his paying a tax upon the timber until it is cut. My only 

 suggestion of fixing the rate was in fixing the rate which he would pay as a 

 yield tax, not by the ordinary method of figuring out a theoretical yield tax at 

 so much per cent, by starting it in and basing it on taxation today so it would 

 be easy to put over. 



Mr. Ostrander : I still do not see how the woodland owner is relieved if he 

 has to foot the bills ? 



Mr. Allen : You mean to pay the bills of the town while that is going on ? 



Mr. Ostrander: Yes. 



Mr. Allen: No, sir; it cannot be done. The only answer that is made is 

 that in a region dependent upon revenue from forests, the yield tax is only going 

 to work in one of two ways, either cutting must be so steady and continuous so 

 that it maintains as much through yield tax as it would through an annual tax, 

 or else that community's revenue must be banked by some other community. In 

 other words, that problem is more difficult in a new state than in an old state. 

 It would be almost impossible for us to keep up with our yield tax in that state 

 at all. Imagine a State in which the total cutting would bring by yield tax as 

 much as the annual timber tax; then you would still have a county here that is 

 not cutting at all. Surely you would have trouble there, and I think that every 

 advocate of a yield tax would think so. It cannot be done unless a State keeps a 

 set of books with each county and the one that is paying in excess is given credit 

 for that and in course of time the new county comes in and pays back the county 

 which is cut out to help it along. It has to be one or the other. Your cutting 

 must be enough to keep up the same revenue or you must bank it between regions. 



One thing I did not bring out in my report which I think I should have is 

 this: There is certainly a growing feeling that the States should go into refor- 

 estation and that they should not do it by buying lands, having to appropriate for 

 the purpose, but that they might get such lands by relieving timber owners of 

 taxation under some contract by which the State acquired the land. There have 

 been many schemes devised for that purpose, but none of them are very perfect 

 because if it amounts to much the State has to forego the revenue of the timber 

 owners. We have discussed that to some extent in the report. We discussed one 

 scheme which was suggested of using certificates against the timber, and those 

 certificates are not much more than warrants and pay six per cent. The timber 

 only pays interest on the certificates and when the owner cuts timber he pays the 

 certificate and it is released to him, but the State in the meantime has the right to 

 purchase the certificate ahead of him. That is rather one ingenious scheme which 

 has been proposed and which might be worked out. 



I would like to say that the Committee think this whole problem of forest 



