In 1997, new legislation, Public Law 1997 Chapter 24 was enacted, which repealed and consolidated previous open space tax legislation and broadened the use of open space tax funds to include park development and maintenance and historic preservation. This report documents the results of a survey conducted by the Green Acres Program of the 10 counties and 20 municipalities that were known to assess an open space tax or had an open space funding program in 1996. It also includes information on the counties and municipalities that passed open space referendums in 1996 and 1997. In this report, the term open space refers to both parkland and farmland. Parkland encompasses developed parks, conservation lands, greenways and is intended to be used in the broadest sense to apply to all types of open space.
Farmland refers to both cultivated and uncultivated lands.
The Green Acres Program acknowledges the work done by The Trust for Public Land in earlier compilations of local government open space funding information. Similar work performed by the Morris Parks and Land Conservancy was also used in the preparation of this report. Green Acres also thanks the 30 local governments who completed the survey for their cooperation. The open space tax survey will be an annual Green Acres project to collect and share information on these important open space funding and preservation efforts.