Impact of New Procedures for Estimating Agricultural Use Values in New York

This paper examines the implications of New York's new procedures for determining agricultural values for use-value assessment purposes. It has been argued that use values based on comparable sales, regardless of efforts to confine the data to farm-to-farm sales, still contained some speculative influences, which in turn, inflated use-value estimates in an urban state like New York. Interestingly, this paper shows that the Legislature's remedy -- use-value estimates based on capitalized net returns to land -- is likely to bring with it rather substantial increases in use values estimated for much of the State's cropland base.