125 Stanford Stories

NO. 104
Innovation

Follow the Money: Mapping federal funding in the U.S. West

follow-the-moeny-finalLibrary of Congress

U.S. Highway 101, shown north of Leggett, California, in 1936, linked California's redwood country to the San Francisco Bay Area and helped open it to trade and resource extraction. Later, much of this forest land became protected ground.

By tracking compensation for tax-exempt lands, Stanford researchers shed light on Western states’ complicated relationship with Washington, D.C.

Nearly half the western United States is federal land – Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands, national parks and wilderness areas, Native American trust lands and U.S. military reservations, among other federal lands.

What are the fiscal consequences of that public ownership, which renders much of the land exempt from taxes? A new Stanford interactive website points toward answers by collecting and mapping the data for the first time.

Forty-seven percent of the U.S. Far West is owned by the federal government. Follow the Money tracks federal funding that compensates for loss of tax revenue from these lands.
Forty-seven percent of the U.S. Far West is owned by the federal government. Follow the Money tracks federal funding that compensates for loss of tax revenue from these lands.

By mapping the geospatial impact of one large category of federal funding programs in 11 Western states, the site, Follow the Money, depicts the federal government’s long and complex imprint on the West.

Follow the Money tracks federal “in-lieu” funds, which help support states, counties and cities with large public land ownership by compensating them for land made tax-exempt under federal law. The funds also compensate localities for revenue lost through environmental restrictions such as curbs on logging.

The data was painstakingly collected under the Freedom of Information Act by a team led by Joseph “Jay” Taylor, a historian at Simon Fraser University and a fellow at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. It was digitally mapped by the Spatial History Project at CESTA, the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford.

Principal researcher Jay Taylor is a fellow at Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West.
Principal researcher Jay Taylor is a fellow at Stanford’s Bill Lane Center for the American West.

On the site, viewers can see how much in-lieu funding was received by a given county in a given year since the first such program began in 1906. They can compare the history of payments within each county and across all counties for each in-lieu program.

Taylor and CESTA hope scholars and the public will use this newly compiled and mapped data to help tell stories of the region.

Knowing the flow of in-lieu money to a given area can help quantify the social effect of federal regulation. It can contextualize spending – or lack thereof – on roads, schools and other infrastructure needed for development and quality of life. Finally, it can inform discussion of the role of government in American society.