09/03/2023

Dear Council Members,

What Bill 2900 implies is that the Council can not do its duty, which is to set tax rates. It is unable to set tax rates because it doesn't have the information it needs on the zone classes to perform the calculation required by law. The classes have been made indecipherable by the Project Development PD. They have the power, and do , keep the agricultural class by name, but give it commercial and resort uses. It can be reasoned after that, how does it make sense to classify by zone when the real effect of that land is its use; resort, commercial, etc.. Perhaps this was the argument given when they stopped the zone class calculation, and only have useclassification being calculated. However, the bigger question is why didn't they change the zoning when they changed the use, so they match?

Well, one reason is Planning would have needed Council's approval, and Council might not have approved of a 140 workforce housing project to be turned into 280 luxury condos. PD's are illegal because they distort the County's zoning ordinance. There has to be some meaningful public participation in zoning, and not be buried in a backroom. PD's are also discriminative because they are conditioned on agricultural land being in the State Urban Zone. If the agricultural land isn't zoned Urban, you can't do a PD. When Ag land is under Urban zoning, Planning doesn't have to remember how we need to protect our "open space", or how we need to keep our agricultural parcels intact, or how dependent we are on ag land for food and housing. They turn it into Resort, and call it Agriculture. Planning has the power beyond reason.

The Ag land without the Urban zoning by State is not the same. Why doesn't the State put conditions on granting Urban Zoning when they know a few people in the Planning Department can override zoning all on their own? (You can call it "use" but it's just overriding something already in place.) The Ag land, without the Urban zone, would have to go through the Amendment process with Council and would require getting permission to change agriculture to resort. Perhaps the Council needs to permit workforce housing through Amendment if the PD won't do it. You need to counteract to keep the State from giving away the farm with their Urban Zone blessings.

The Director of Finance still has the ability to break out the numbers by zone class regardless of how obscure the PD's and RP's classification of use has made it. I say, another reason they don't want to do it is because it will show agricultural land is paying too high of a percentage of overall property tax. And that will bring scrutiny of why a couple big land owners pay so little.

The other oppressive weight Bill 2900 puts on agricultural land is in singling out ways to shift tax burdens to the agriculture class. Although the County Charter says Real Property must assess to highest and best use, RP doesn't assess for density. However, by equating legally subdivided parcels with CPR's in this Bill, RP is inflating agricultural values.

CPR's have sat 10, 20, 30 years as vacant land with no dwellings, here is where RP decides not to assess for "use". There is no residence or dwelling, but RP assesses as if you're an entitled, like a County approved, with all the utilities and roads, subdivided parcel. Again, we are asked to suspend our reasoning.

Everyone knows the laws were set up at Statehood to benefit a special class of elite landholders. However, now, after seeing the disregard the policies have had for the common people's needs, like housing; and the government's pervasive self serving of entitled landholders whose only mission is to raise the value of their land holdings, and at the same time deny development rights to anyone else, reveals a heavy level of oppression that was carried out from the beginning in order to protect them from any challenge of their supreme stance on their development rights. An audit will show the property tax system is pervaded by special tax favors for some, and targeted monetary demands for others.The aggressive mass policy to build this machine, will make it hard to unwind. It has gone too far, people need protection.

Respectively,

Jeffrey Lindner