Farmland Tax Breaks Targeted : Agriculture: County supervisors approve a program to crack down on violators of rules to preserve open space.

Ventura County supervisors on Tuesday authorized a new enforcement program to crack down on landowners who receive undeserved tax breaks under a farmland preservation program.

When the enforcement rules are in place next year, the county will begin to push unqualified owners out of the 28-year-old farmland program for the first time. Now, when abuses are discovered, owners are sometimes asked to leave voluntarily, but are not forced out.

“We’d like to hone in on those that are not worthy of the tax breaks,” county Planning Director Keith Turner told the board.

However, the scope of the crackdown will be limited to obvious abuses because supervisors agreed that a broader enforcement program would be too costly and potentially harmful to the county’s goals of preserving open space. Nor is abuse of the program widespread, Turner said.

Between 25 and 30 of the county’s 975 contracts with landowners under the Land Conservation Act of 1965, the so-called Williamson Act, have been identified as questionable, he said.

Those parcels were identified because their sizes do not meet minimum county size standards of 80 acres for grazing land and 40 acres for livestock operations, officials said. Neither total acres nor tax benefits under the questionable contracts were calculated.

The Planning Department’s survey did not consider whether agricultural operations are actually taking place on contract land, which is a second basic standard for inclusion in the program, Planning Supervisor Nancy Butler Francis said.

About one-fourth of all privately owned land in the county, or 151,000 acres, is enrolled in the program.

Under it, farmers and ranchers receive tax breaks in exchange for agreeing to keep their land in agriculture for at least 10 more years.

Turner’s crackdown proposal was before the supervisors because a previous random Planning Department survey indicated that owners of 6,300 acres--34% of land in that sample--received tax breaks for which they may not qualify.

The Times reported last month that a Hollywood star, an English lord, a television production company, a former U.S. ambassador and a gravel pit operator were among the landlords that apparently receive undeserved tax breaks--some worth thousands of dollars a year.

*

Strict county guidelines require landowners to run bona fide farming or ranching operations to receive tax benefits as farmland preserves.

The supervisors endorsed enforcement of those guidelines. But they also made it clear that they do not want to harm a program they see as invaluable in stopping leapfrog development in this county.

“It’s been so beneficial, we couldn’t even begin to quantify how beneficial,” Supervisor Maria VanderKolk said. “Clearly, there’s no question. . . this is something we should continue to do.”

Supervisor Maggie Kildee described the farmland program as “a tool to help keep agriculture viable” in Ventura County.

The county crackdown also was endorsed by Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “I think we can have a good strong program and have one that is strictly enforced,” Laird said.

Supervisors endorsed Laird’s recommendation that the county’s Agricultural Advisory Committee help draft the criteria to determine if landowners qualify as ranchers and farmers.

The committee also will review county guidelines that implement the Williamson Act program to see if marginal farmland that might not strictly qualify for it should be included because of its value as open space.

County guidelines, reflecting state law, included open space provisions until 1984. Then local farmers successfully recommended that the regulations be tightened to allow only the participation of true farm and ranch lands.

*

The county’s stricter guidelines have not been enforced because of a lack of staff time and money--problems that still stymie broad enforcement, officials said.

Turner, who last month estimated undeserved local tax breaks at between several hundred thousand dollars and $1 million a year, now reports that the amount gained by a full-scale crackdown is impossible to gauge--but is far less than he first thought.

While $3.65 million annually is lost in local property tax because of Williamson Act tax breaks, only a fraction of that amount could be regained by cracking down on abusers of the program, Turner said.

And the county’s general fund--which would pay for beefed-up enforcement--would get just 18% of the recaptured taxes, he said. The rest would go to schools (56%), special districts (19%) and cities (7%), he said.

In addition, the county general fund would lose part of its state subsidy for the Williamson Act program each time it threw out a violator, Turner said.

If the entire Williamson Act program were eliminated--and not just the abusers thrown out--the county general fund’s 18% share of recaptured taxes would be $657,360, Turner said.

But once lost state subsidies are considered, he said, the net gain would be only $372,000, and even that would be gained incrementally during a phaseout period over the next nine years.

Turner said a limited enforcement program--which would require no new county employees--could still identify unqualified landowners.

Under the crackdown, property owners who do not qualify as legitimate farmers or ranchers would be targeted when violations are obvious, through citizen complaints or during questioning when owners apply for special permits to alter their properties, Turner said.

*

Several of the questionable properties are in Hidden Valley west of Thousand Oaks, one of the nation’s richest communities. Some parcels are either too small to qualify as legitimate livestock operations or owners do not house enough animals to meet minimum county requirements.

Those are the types of parcels that the Farm Bureau’s Laird said the county agricultural committee should consider when determining which landowners qualify for Williamson Act benefits.