Although not extensively reported in the big city papers, in the California state budget passed a couple of weeks ago, Sacramento and Governor Arnold eliminated funding for the Williamson Act.
This act, dating back to the l960's, gives farmers and ranchers a 20-70 percent break on property taxes. helping to preserve agriculture and open space, not to mention reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.
As Tom Elias wrote in an editorial for the Ventura County Star:
though it eliminates far more climate-changing carbon from the
atmosphere than any other program now in effect or contemplated
anywhere in the world, including the cap-and-trade proposals of both
President Barack Obama and the California Air Resources Board.
The Williamson Act is a 43-year-old program named for John
Williamson, a 1960s-era assemblyman from Kern County, that gives
farmers a property-tax subsidy if they pledge to keep their land in
agriculture for 10 to 20 years. It currently protects 16.4 million
acres of farm and ranch land from development.
And here’s what that has to do with being green: A Purdue University
study earlier this decade found that every acre of farmland in that
state pulls an estimated 0.107 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the
air each year. That’s for all types of farmland, including grazing
land, vineyards, rice fields, cotton fields, orchards and more.
This is a lowball figure, of course, because it’s based on Indiana
lands. No green leaves or blades of grass take carbon from the air
there during the winter, as they do here. But even under those
conditions, far less advantageous than in California, the math works
out to a minimum total of 1.754 million tons of carbon absorbed yearly
by those 16.4 million Williamson Act acres. Or 3.5 billion pounds.
Nothing else planned anywhere involves more than a fraction of those
amounts.
Schwarzenegger, the much-hyped champion of the battle against global
warming, knows this. He was given the numbers during a 2007 press
conference after his press secretary admitted the governor and his
staff knew nothing of the Williamson Act’s climate-changing relevance.
This was immediately after he first proposed cutting out the state’s
support for the program, a cut that did not happen because legislators
restored funding. The governor, no longer able to deny knowledge of his
hypocrisy, also tried to chop the program in budget negotiations
earlier this year, but was thwarted again by lawmakers.
So why is "Ahnold" bound and determined to eliminate funding to preserve ag and open space, even if it means adding CO2 to the air?
Could his decision be influenced by the twenty million in contributions he's gotten from developers?
(graph courtesy of ArnoldWatch)
Kit Stolz 
Thanks so much for this. I found your blog while searching for info on the current state of the Williamson Act in CA. I am a family farmer in San Benito County & part of a community of small, sustainable, pasture-based grazing farms that strive to farm in harmony with nature. We live in Panoche Valley, home to many threatened and endangered species (providing valuable core habitat to some of those species). The valley is almost entirely in contract under the Williamson Act. The valley floor is rated Prime Agriculture Land with Class 1 soil, the highest rating possible under the LCA. A company called Solargen has proposed building the worlds largest utility-scale solar factory’s in Panoche Valley. This would decimate the valley, ecologically and agriculturally. The only thing protecting us right now is the Williamson Act, hence my interest.
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