Weekly journal-miner., 1911-08-30
Brilliant Array of Legal Talent Fights Against Proposed Increase in The
 Interest of the Santa Fe
(Fr0n Sat4naay's Daay.l

barbed wire fence and the improve ments placed thereon by the individ- uals through their own effort and industry.
 There are thousands of acres held by individuals in Big Chino Valley which are assessed from $1,25 to 5 per acre all of which were formerly owned by the railroad company, and while owned by the railroad company were returned for assessment at 25 cents per acre.
 These individuals have been com plaining for many years that the railroad company was only paying 9 cents per acre and they were being assessed as high as twenty times as much for similar classes of land, and have been praying for proper equal ization of this land, their complaint being that, either they were being assessed too high of the railroad too i low.
 The assessors most telling point, and one which the railroad company did not see fit to dispute, is the fact that it is impossible to purchase small tracts of land and that all the large tracts are being held at $2.5O per acre.
 That since the year 1888 these lands have been assessed at not less than the present price returned by the railroad company, nOtwithstand ing the reductions in tax rates and a demand for such land for timber and grazing purposes wherein the railroad company has received nearly three times as much in such fees as their present tax amounts to under the present rate Outside of the terri tories of New Mexico and Arizona no lands under private ownership are assessed at such a small valuation.
 Afternoon Session
 In his summing up Taiaferro said that he considered ? cents fair valuation for all the land owned by the company, some of which was ab- solutely useless and the best of which was only used for grazing purposes.
 'We consider this classification made by the assessor unfair because it is impossible for him in the time taken to have covered each and ev- cry individual plot of forty acres the land under discussion as you know covers an area of 2Is,OOO acres.
 Every bit of this land is used today for grazing purposes except | that which is valueless and is not l used for any purpose whatsoever. And this fact ought to determine its value and that value should be the value you place upon grazing land.
 "We have sold some of this land for timber purposes and you should | collect the tax on timber land from the men who have bought that land and who are devoting it to that pur- pose and upon the land itself.
 "You complain that we will not sell land in small tracts to those who may desire to purchase it. Of course not. because every purchaser has pick ed out some particular section, of say | forty acres, for some particular strat- egic purpose and this forty acres for which he desires to pay about dollar an acre will give him control of a township.
 "You say that the land is good for dry farming purposes and you know as well as I do that dry farm ing today is nothing better than an experiment.
 "We own a lot of land in the forest reserve and that land brings us the great revenue of just one cent per acre, and a lot of it remained unleased until two years ago.
 "You are assessing as you see noth- ing but grazing land and I respect fully request that you assess this as grazing land and not as anything else.