APB agenda 081804 - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

� f- OL Page 6 farmland preservation report July - Aug. 2004 VIRGINIA $12 million tax credit under I review by state Continued from page I Corps. The problem is, they took a proffer and construed it as a gift," Gilbert said. "I do know the Virginia Department of Taxation is aware of this issue." According to Schultze, the department is reviewing a number of claims with "valuations that appear to be unreasonable" and "potentially inflated," but no formal audits have begun. He would not comment on individual cases. The Silver Companies easement accepted by Gilbert's organization in 2002 covers 308 acres of woodlands that contain Civil War artillery earthworks across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg. Just four of the acres were not required by the Army Corps permit, and are the only acres the company can claim was a donation, Gilbert said. The company is developing a golf course adjacent to the site and a Virginia Outdoors Foundation easement is also adjacent across the river. In a Q &A on its website, Silver Companies asks whether the conservation measures at its development site are merely routine and regulatory, and states "some are, but the donation of the easement - totaling almost one - quarter of the land at Celebrate America North - and measures to protect the quality of the water ... are exemplary." "We certainly told Silver Companies that it was not a qualified gift," Gilbert said. "At the time we did the easement they didn't seem inter- ested in the credit." Gilbert said he did not see the appraisal that valued the easement at $24 million and his effort to contact the Richmond appraiser was unsuccessful. Mary Heinricht of Ag Prospects, a consulting firm in Culpeper, said the transferrability of the conservation tax credit should be reexamined. "The General Assembly created a tradeable commodity without finding a way to utilize it to benefit the state... if you're going to create a tax credit that's transferrable you should control who can buy and sell it. It could be offered to ag industries as an economic development tool. You could stabilize the land base and give incentives to business all with the same pot of money." An attempt to amend the law in that direction this year failed when land trusts argued the changes would slow conservation donations. "Virginia has the best tax credit in the nation," said Paul Gilbert, who said focusing on possible abuses "is counterproductive to the cause of land conservation ... this is not a get rich quick scheme, it is a meaning- ful incentive that is helping more landowners be able to make the conservation gift they would like to." According to the Virginia Department of Taxation, since 2002, the first year tax credits could be transferred, conservation donors have claimed $85.3 million in tax credits on 165 easements registered with the department and $26.6 million in credits were transferred to 838 buyers. spotlight Long Island ag, zoning & Robert Moses Part Two of Two Last issue, Dr. Lee Koppelman, pioneer planner of 1960s Suffolk County NY, talked about hard times for farmers in the nation's fastest growing county at that time, and how the Suffolk purchase of development rights program, the nation's first, came into being. This month, Koppelman, interviewed at his SUNY -Stony Brook office in May, talks about overwhelming odds in farmland loss, zoning and farmers, the IRS, and working with legendary New York City public works czar and landscape architect Robert Moses. FPR: What happened to Suffolk Co. farmland in the booming 1980s? KOPPELMAN: A lot of the farms were no longer in the hands of farmers. They were in the hands of speculators. And the speculators would give the farmers 10 percent down and then agree to pay off the balance over five years and in many cases let the farmer stay in agriculture until the developer was ready to either flip the property to a builder or use the property themselves. The advantage to the farmers, was, in getting the 10 percent down, plus the interest on the balance, that was whittling down the capital value of the farm, so in effect they were avoiding getting hit by IRS in a big way. So a lot of the farmers were selling out, and we discovered that in some areas as much as two- thirds of the agricultural land was now in the hands of speculators. That meant we were going to lose agriculture completely. So we had to modernize the program. One of the things we did do was to get our Congressional delegation to support a ruling from the IRS that the farmers could treat this as a five -year capital gain in order to avoid punitive taxes. FPR: So it was like an installment purchase... KOPPELMAN: In effect ... they got the money up front, but it was treated as if it