Governor Jennifer Granholm has disappointed farmland preservation advocates by vetoing a bill that would have changed the way farmland is valued for tax purposes.

Michigan is currently the only state in the nation that assesses farmland on the basis of its potential development value, rather than its agricultural use value, according to this Record-Eagle article. Granholm is of course responding to Michigan's horrendous budget problems--when you're fighting deficits as big as ours, you have to worry about any measure that will diminish tax revenues--but, like the defeat of the purchase of development rights measure in Leelanau last fall, it's gonna hurt the effort to preserve agriculture in Leelanau and elsewhere.