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ferred through use value, according to Eastham. “Who are those ten percent? Fanners?” he asked.
The county’s comprehensive plan lists the number of farmers and farm managers as 91, Eastham told the supervisors, estimating that 60 are “real, honest to God, working for their whole living on the farm farmers.” And who are the rest, he asked. “The rest are investors in real estate, speculators in real estate...It is a crime...to subsidize...people who speculate in real estate,” Eastham maintained.
He continued that last year, the supervisors took $400,000 from surplus funds to “neatly cover up this operation" of preferential assessments. Without that surplus, the county’s tax rate would have been at least 50 cents instead of 32 cents, Eastham said.
Where Is The Surplus?
“Where is that surplus now, gentlemen? I can’t find it anywhere,” he noted, predicting that government funding will show a deficit at the end of this fiscal year. “You can steal from the budget—pardon me, transfer from the budget—one time...The dark cloud is going to hit June 30, 1983...You’re going to have to shoot the tax rate up to at least 50 cents unless you cut the school budget, the whole budget, to ribbons,” Eastham said.
The present land use taxation program is not only inequitable, it violates the Golden Rule’s admonition to treat a neighbor as you would want to be treated,
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