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When Virginia General Assembly adopted land use legislation as a local option, it did so with the aim of giving localities another tool to preserve endanged farming operations. The supervisors adopted general use value taxation here for that very purpose. They did so at the urging of the head of the State Department of Taxation’s Property Tax Division who warned that without use value, implementation of 100 percent fair market taxation here would shift the tax burden onto farms, forests and open spaces.
Eastham sees the land use taxation program adopted in 1981 as the direct cause of our current fiscal crisis. He claims that the differential assessment program allows $40 million of taxable assets to escape taxation each year. That sounds like an incredible chunk of money—$40,000,000. And it is not what land use taxation is costing Rappahannock’s tax payers.
According to the commissioner of revenue, land use meant five cents on the tax rate in 1982. This'year, she re
95.1%