FOREST TAXATION IN THE UNITED STATES 145 
inequalities. The remedy is to be found only in the accurate assess- 
ment of individual properties. The benefits to the public generally 
from good assessment are so material as to promise support for a 
program of improving this function, if the public can be brought to 
see these advantages. Means of improving assessment will be sug- 
gested at a latter point in this report, in connection with the general 
summary and recommendations (p. 541). 
APPORTIONMENT 
THE TAX DISTRICTS 
A tax district embraces all of the property that is taxed for the 
support of a unit of government or a single governmental function. 
The tax district may be coterminous with a unit of governmental 
administration, such as the State, county, town, village, or city; or 
it may be simply a unit of taxation for the support of a single govern- 
mental service, such as the school, road, or fire-protection district. 
A tax district may include several assessment districts or an assess- 
ment district may include several tax districts. Likewise, a political 
unit may include many tax districts or be included as a part of a 
tax district. It often happens that overlapping of tax districts 
occurs, 1. e., one district may be superimposed on parts of two or 
more other districts. 
The size of the tax district normally depends upon the territory 
served or capable of being served by the governmental function for 
which the tax is levied. ‘Thus the smallest of the tax districts in a 
given State may be as large in area as a New England State, such 
as the county in sparsely settled districts of the West, or as small 
as a few hundred acres, as boroughs in Connecticut. The State is 
the largest of the tax districts in all of those States which levy a 
State property tax. 
The number of tax districts is enormous. In a statement by 
Lacy (28), S. E. Leland is credited with an estimate of 250,000 
units of government in the United States, each with power to levy 
taxes. Nine counties in northern Michigan with a total assessed 
value of less than $32,000,000 are reported to have 470 separate 
tax-levying districts (29). 
The forest owner js often very much concerned with this multiplicity 
of tax districts. The function of the smaller tax district is nearly 
always to serve the residents, but the bulk of the cost may, through 
the process of gerrymandering, fall on the nonresident land owners. 
By gerrymandering is meant the division of a county or other civil 
division into tax or civil districts in an unnatural or unfair way. 
Large areas of unimproved land without any permanent residents are 
included within the minor tax districts in an unnatural way in order 
that they may aid in the support of functions desired only by the local 
settlement. Thus the people in the local settlement are given an 
advantage in being allowed to impose a share of the burdens of their 
particular local government on an area not bound to it geographically 
or economically. 
In a township in northern Minnesota, for example, notices are posted 
on the wild cut-over land of absentee owners, miles from the nearest 
settlement, ordering them to cut their weeds or said weeds will be 
101285°—35——10 
