2011-04-08 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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MS. POMEROY: Well important agricultural lands was, you might know this, mandated in 2008 that the county needs to designate important agricultural lands. I’m not an expert on that topic but what that does is it gives incentives to property owners that have the best ag land to designate their land as agricultural under IAL. There’s tax incentives for them to do that. There’s farm labor housing allowances that they would get that they don’t normally get and some other things in the package that would give them incentive to do that because the idea of designating important ag lands is to keep the land in agriculture rather than development. MS. NICHOLSON: So how does that generate more money for the county if you’re looking at tax incentives? So these are county tax incentives then for the most part? MS. POMEROY: I’m not sure if it’s also state or just county. I don’t have the answer to that. MS. NICHOLSON: We had some discussion, Ken, maybe you can recall because you were kind of looking at this, of use of agricultural lands and some people who claim use of agricultural lands that perhaps are not really agricultural lands. But you’re sort of on the other side of that. You’re talking about encouraging agricultural lands. MR. ARMOUR: I think this is two different issues. I don’t understand this whole program that you… My understanding is that under this program that Kathie’s talking about you have 100 acres and you say I want to dedicate this to agriculture so you sign a kind of contract to put that land into agriculture. The other thing that we were talking about is if somebody has 4 acres or 10 acres, they put a fence around it and then they go apply and say this is agriculture now and they get tax benefits by doing that. The county says all right you qualify so now your taxes are $100 or $150 a year and that’s no commitment at all on the land owner. MS. POMEROY: Ithink you have to backup even another step before that because designating important ag lands is about making maps because we don’t really have a picture of what the best ag lands are now. We need to get all the data that we have already and find out what is the best land for ag. So that’s the first step. I just want to put that in because some people fence their rocky area in Kawaihae and it gets counted as ag. We’re talking about land that can be productive. MR. ARMOUR: The second part was that anybody can do it if they think they can get an agricultural exemption. They’re supposed to justify it by actually doing agriculture but in our conversation we had there’s some lands that they fence up two sides of it and then they go and get a permit or not even a permit, they file for agricultural lands and they never do anything on it to get the tax break. MS. POMEROY: Yeah well this is… Important ag lands is to help prevent that kind of setup like Kohala ranch or any number of developments that are really not agriculturally productive. So getting back to the whole statement; Collaborate with Public Works and Real Property Tax Division to create efficiency and opportunity incentives for important ag lands. I think important ag lands are our number one priority for the Ag Advisory Commission right now to try to get this designated and followed through. It’s been mandated. So the whole picture of that happening is a step in the direction of having more efficiency and opportunity incentives for agriculture. It’s like the most important step that needs to be done right now and it costs money so it’s kind of been put off and put off and is still being put off. MS. NICHOLSON: It costs money for the farmers or for the county? 5