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Show 624 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT lands had gone into private ownership. Not only was this difference unfair to the western states but, so they held, it tended to retard their development, narrowed the tax base, made economic interests subject to the whims and fancies of administrative officials and to Congress, in which the West's voice was not sufficiently regarded. Why, it was asked, should bureaucratic officials in Washington determine the number of livestock in the national forests and grazing districts, retain and restrict the development of mineral resources in the public lands, decide when and for how much stumpage in the forests should be sold and how it should be cut? It would be better for such resources to be owned and managed by the individual states whose officials would be more closely in touch with the local situation. In 1929-33 the West had failed to agree upon state ownership of the rangelands, as has been seen, because the offer President Hoover made did not include their rich mineral resources. Without the minerals the states questioned whether the land was worth having. But if both the grazing district and national forest lands with their mineral resources could be conveyed there was no question as to the tremendous boon they would be. The opposition in Congress to the current policies of the two agencies serving the grazing and forest lands, beginning with Senator McCarran's investigation in 1941, reached a high point in 1947-53. Critics of these agencies hoped to effect either sale of the rangelands to permittees or cession to the states. Marshall M. Kelso, a distinguished agricultural economist, examined the economic advantages or disadvantages of private ownership of low value rangelands and came up with some observations that should have caused the advocates of cession to pause. Three factors preventing the conversion of the public rangelands to private ownership were: (1) the multiple use of much of the land for wildlife, for recreation, and for watershed protection, especially the steep-sloped areas that protected the major water sources of cities like Salt Lake City; (2) the economic impossibility of much of the land paying its own way in private ownership; and (3) the fact that much of it was "not amenable to division into areas for single enterpriser control." Concerning the second point Kelso held that lands of low productivity were over-valued for tax purposes and since the grazing lands were of specially low productivity (the best having passed to private ownership long since), taxation might compel their owners to resort to overgrazing to get as much from them as possible. Studies of the taxes on privately owned rangelands showed that in Montana assessments were more than twice as much as the land was worth and on the poorest quality land they were seven times as much as the land was worth. In Nevada taxes were twice as high as the value of the forage. If the lands were conveyed to stockmen the taxes on their base property would not be lowered and the tax on the range-lands would be added to their burden, making it heavier than before the transfer, even if the grazing fee were included in their previous costs.39 It is doubtful that leaders of the livestock industry gave much attention to the economic problems involved in the transfer of ownership. Livestock Industry Associations At the time Senator McCarran was conducting his vendetta against the Grazing Service there were probably less than 70,000 ranches of substantial size in the range states and no more than 20,000 livestock 39 M. M. Kelso, "Current Issues in Federal Land Management in the Western United States," Journal of Farm Economics, Proceedings (November 1947), pp. 1295-1313, quoted in Marion Clawson, The Western Range Livestock Industry (New York, 1950), pp. 107-110, 256. |