Over the past three decades, voters of all stripes in municipalities, counties, and states throughout the country have voted to tax themselves to protect the land they love for future generations. The Trust For Public Land's LandVote® Database is the premier source of information about these measures.
The LandVote database brings together the most comprehensive history available for conservation finance measures that have been placed on the ballot.
Below, we hope to shed some light on various types of ballot measures that LandVote tracks and the critical role the Trust for Public Land's conservation finanance team plays in protecting land for people across the nation.
The Trust for Public Land helps state and local governments design, pass, and implement legislation and ballot measures that create new public funds for parks and land conservation. We’ve helped pass more than 527 ballot measures—an 81 percent success—creating $68 billion in voter approved funding for parks, land conservation, and restoration. Every $1 invested in this program has generated more than $2,000 in new public funds.
Our conservation finance services include:
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1. Total funds represent funds generated through the entire ballot measure for all purposes.
2. Conservation funds represent funds generated for land acquisition and protection only.
For example, suppose there is a bond measure for $60 million, of which $30 million will be used for land acquisition and protection and $30 million will be for other various capital improvements. This measure would appear in LandVote as $60 million total funds and $30 million conservation funds. Both sets of figures document and help explain the substantial voter support that exists for conservation and the voters’ willingness to pay for conservation.
1. State
2. County
3. Municipal
4. Special Disticts
1. Pay as you go measures authorize sales, property, income, and other taxes to pay for conservation. When a ballot measure authorizes a new tax, LandVote counts the estimated revenue generated for the duration of the tax. When the tax is not limited to a specific term, a duration of 20 years is used. In all cases the total funds generated over the life of the measure are conservatively estimated and do not reflect likely increases in the tax base. When a ballot measure increases an existing tax, LandVote counts only the value of the added increment.
2. Bond measures authorize the use of bonded indebtedness (general obligation bonds) for the purpose of financing capital improvements such as land conservation. In tabulating results, LandVote counts the face value of the bonds authorized, rather than the much higher value of repaying the bonds in the future. Bonds usually extend for 20 or 30 years.
This LandVote Interactive Vizualization was created by Patrick Smyth for Dr. Ian Muehlenhaus's Interactive Cartography & Geovisualization course at UW-Madison. Completed in May 2017.
This project was inspired by your body not your choice, created by Katie Kowalsky, Dylan Moriarty, and Robin Tolochko.
This project was built with D3, Queue, jQuery, jQuery Timer and Bootstrap.
All of the code for this project is available on GitHub, here.