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The Rappahannock supervisors have allowed themselves to be pressured into taking on a difficult impossible task and for no justifiable reason.
Last week’s hearing on an agricultural district became a forum for attack on use value taxation. Faced with the threat of resignation from a school board member unless action on the proposed district was delayed and a study of land use impact ordered, the supervisors acquiesced. The study is to show how non-eligible house and lot owners have been affected by the use value program with its tax deferral benefits afforded to qualifying farmers, orchardists and owners of forest and open space land.
Former Supervisor E.P. Luke, an outspoken critic who voted against the implementation of general use value taxation, is to make the study. He spent hours in the commissioner of revenue’s office last week, looking over the 1981 and 1982 land books, pre- and post-land use.
The problem is that pre- and post-land use is also pre- and post-fair market value assessment.
The new assessments on which 1982 property taxes are based provoked screams of outrage from those who thought the value of their homes and acres had been upped far too high. (Countywide, the worth of taxable property went from $11,582,821 to $241,140,400).
If Col. Luke’s study focuses on the increase in appraised value between 1981 (before land use) and 1982 (after land use), how is he going to separate the re-assessment impact from the land use impact?
If he compares individual tax bills from 1981 and 1982, how will he determine what portion of an increase is attributable to the re-assessment and what portion to absorbing the value deferred in the land use program?
The supervisors were warned by an expert, the head of the personal property tax division of the State Department of Taxation, that without use value and with the new re-assessment, the county’s tax burden would shift to undeveloped land. When they adopted countywide use value to offset that shift, they did so on a oneyear trial basis. Before voting to continue it, the supervisors reviewed a report from the commissioner of revenue, showing the impact of the differential assessment program.
At the March 7 public hearing on the proposed ag district, critics attacked that year-old report, claiming that it showed nothing. Yet when Merle Scoggin submitted the report, no member of the board of supervisors voiced a single question or requested any additional data.
Far from showing nothing, Scoggin’s report shows the only concrete evidence on the impact of land use. With land use, a tax rate of 32 cents per $100 of appraised value was required in order to generate revenue necessary to finance local government. Without land use, the tax rate needed to generate that same revenue would have been 27.2 cents. So
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