The coal lands in certain parts of the state have increased a hundred per cent, in value for a period of ten years, while in other portions of the state the increase in value has been very slight. The values as a whole are increasing from year to year.
The Wisconsin Tax Commissioner, after a most exhaustive report, makes the following statement:[1]
Under present statutes minerals enter into the valuation of the land in which they are deposited. This law is absolutely impossible of just enforcement. The assessor can have no reliable information as to the amount of the mineral in the ground, even in operated mines, much less its value, which must depend upon the quantity and quality of the deposit, cost of mining, and other matters requiring the highest expert knowledge. In practise the consequence is that no effect is as a rule made to tax the mineral.
The net result of this rather extensive inquiry into the increase in the value of mineral lands was therefore practically nil.
Even less success attended the attempt to secure any reliable information regarding the value of water sites. The development of water power on a commercial basis is so recent, and the variation in the facilities afforded by different sites is so extreme, that it seems impossible to make any just estimate of the extent to which these sites are increasing in value. It seems fair, however, to state that with the exhaustion of the coal supply, on the one hand, and the improvements in electrical appliances on the other, the near future should witness a rapid advance in the commercial value of water-power facilities.
Aside from the discouragement involved in this attempt to draw statistical blood from an economic stone, the results yielded by the study of land values, though in no sense conclusive, are in every way suggestive. The federal government has recently completed an extensive investigation of the lumber industry. The Census Department and the Department of Agriculture both attempt to secure farm values, and a number of cities have instituted systems of separate assessments for land and improvements, which makes a determination of land values in those cities comparatively easy. Therefore, for timber lands, for farm lands and for city land the sources of information merit attention.
Unlike mineral and fuel deposits, timber tracts are susceptible of definite measurement and valuation. Private dealers as well as state and federal authorities were most generous in the cooperation. The information from private sources and from state officials is intended only to corroborate and supplement the excellent body of information compiled by the Bureau of Corporations.
Timber is an anti-social scapegrace. For a generation it has been the leader in the merry race of upward-moving prices. Since 1890, the prices of timber products have risen faster than the prices of any other group of commodities. The latest wholesale price-list issued by
- ↑ Report of the Wisconsin Tax Commission, 1910, Madison, Wis., 1911, p. 16.
