Land Value Taxation by California Irrigation Districts.

Californians have had long experience in the use of a device of local government known as an irrigation district. This is one of a class of greatly diverse forms of public districts which in some states of the United States are in wide and growing use and in others almost unknown. Districts as such are something of a mystery to most people although they are in fact a simple conception. Simple and ingenious, they provide a means of accomplishing two basic ends: questions relative to projects of calamitous local import may be locally decided, and boundaries of tax burden may be conformed with those of the anticipated project benefit. In the case of California irrigation districts, which tax all the land whether the owner irrigates or not and tax only land, exempting improvements, there has been a kind of side benefit of extraordinary importance to the state. Where invoked these provisions have combined to change a semiarid land from expectable permanent slumber as an area of absentee baronies to one of prosperous independent farms and rural cities offering social as well as economic rewards to the State.