Green tax breaks in Crawford County causing consternation

If you find a pretty view in Crawford County, you may well be looking at someone else’s tax breaks.

There are plenty of both. About 40 percent of Crawford County’s land is in a single conservation program that lowers the taxes on the land, without state help to offset the shortfall, said County Manager Pat Kelly.

He estimates the county’s tax base is 20 percent lower than it would be without the conservation programs, pinching the county’s ability to deliver services.

Kelly is no opponent of the conservation programs. Some of his own land is protected as well, but he’s calling a meeting of local and state officials to try to figure out if anything can be done to help counties that are hit hardest by the conservation programs, which are popular.

“It’s continuing to grow, and it should. That was the intent, to create green space and conserve these valuable resources that the county has, and that all the state wants to enjoy,” Kelly said. “We want the state to enjoy, but they’ve got to share the burden at some point.”

He’s mostly worried about a program called the Conservation Use Value Assessment program, created more than two decades ago. Property owners pledge to use the land for agricultural or forestry purposes for 10 years. The program is available for parcels from 10 to 2,000 acres, Kelly said.

Some 83,000 acres of Crawford County’s roughly 205,000 acres are in the program, and the county gets no state help to offset the lower tax base. In contrast, a newer program for properties larger than 2,000 acres known as the Forest Land Protection Act offsets the initial costs of the program, and then limits costs to no more than 3 percent of the tax base. The state pays half the costs up to 3 percent, then covers anything over that.

State Rep. Robert Dickey, whose family started Dickey Farms in Crawford County early in the 20th century, said he’s interested in talking with Kelly about possible changes to the Conservation Use Value Assessment program.

But while the conservation agreements limit how much tax money comes in, they also don’t require much government services, Dickey said.

Such conservation agreements block farmland from being turned into cheap housing that would have high demands for services and limited tax payments, he said.

“The benefits are harder to measure than the dollars and cents collected every year,” he said. “That 100 acres of soybeans doesn’t require hospitalization and a classroom.”

Kelly said he wants to see the Conservation Use Value Assessment program get some sort of mechanism to limit the county’s losses, much as the newer Forest Land Protection Act program has.

He said the conservation use program is costing the county more than $1.1 million per year, forcing it to keep taxes higher or services lower than it otherwise would have. Kelly said he’s not opposed to the program, but instead wants to share the burden of it across the state. The program probably has limited impact to an industrialized county like Bibb, and probably none at all to an all-urban place such as Fulton County, he said.

Crawford County isn’t like that. While most of the land is agricultural, most of the residents work somewhere else. Crawford County doesn’t have much of a tax base.

“Eighty percent of the county gets in a car every morning and drives to Bibb, Houston or Peach (counties), and they take advantage of our beautiful woods and creeks and water, and they should. That’s what this county’s all about,” Kelly said. “But we still need to maintain our law enforcement and our judges and all the things associated with running a county. It has a price tag. Unfortunately, costs seem to be rising rather than going the other way.”

Kelly said he also wants to make sure the county is properly handling applications for the conservation programs, neither rejecting proper filings nor approving incorrect ones.

The meeting, which could include county commissioners, state legislators, school board members, tax assessors and representatives from the Georgia Department of Revenue, is scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday in the conference room of the Crawford County Development Authority, 1011 U.S. 341, Roberta.

Kelly and Dickey said they expect the meeting will help everyone understand the issues better without being confrontational.

This story was originally published September 17, 2014 at 2:12 PM with the headline "Green tax breaks in Crawford County causing consternation ."