San Jose
– The county inched closer Monday to evicting thousands of
property owners, recipients of questionable tax breaks under a
state law intended to preserve agriculture, from Williamson Act
protection.
San Jose – The county inched closer Monday to evicting thousands of property owners, recipients of questionable tax breaks under a state law intended to preserve agriculture, from Williamson Act protection.
At a Housing and Land Use Committee meeting Monday, Santa Clara County Agriculture Commissioner Greg Van Wassenhove and Supervisor Don Gage unveiled interim guidelines that say Williamson Act contracts apply only to parcels of at least 10 acres of prime farmland – typically valley floor land able to support orchards or row crops – or 40 acres of non-prime grazing land. Most horse operations will not be considered agriculture. Additionally, prime land parcels must generate at least $3,500 of farm income annually. The minimum for non-prime land would be $2,000. If approved by the full Board of Supervisors, the interim guidelines would be used until new ones are finalized later this year.
“These are only suggestions. We have to have guidelines to go by as we move this process forward,” Gage said at a meeting of the county’s Housing Land Use, Environment and Transportation Committee. “There are always some people who are going to be disappointed. If we threw out all the rules and regulations, somebody would be unhappy with us.”
Supervisors will also vote on whether to suspend any new applications to the Williamson Act this year, an idea endorsed at Tuesday’s meeting by both Gage and Supervisor Pete McHugh.
Setting a January deadline to send out non-renewal notices will allow the county to cleanse its books of non-compliant Williamson contracts by 2007, five years after it was first directed by the state to properly enforce the law.
“I’m really going to push non-renewal,” Jenny Derry, executive director of the Santa Clara County Farm Bureau, said, referring to parcels that don’t meet minimum acreages. “A blanket non-renewal is the only way to clean up this mess.”
The mess is the nearly 1,200 county property owners who may be receiving an illegitimate tax break, often as much as several thousand dollars annually, intended for farmers.
Under the 1965 Williamson Act, property owners receive a tax break in exchange for maintaining a farming enterprise or preserving particular types of open space. But over the last 30 years, the county has allowed legion illegal subdivisions.
As properties have been sold and developed, agriculture has vanished from the county, but the tax breaks have stayed in place. Former grazing lands, like Golden Heights, east of Gilroy, and the San Martin Estates, have been converted to ranchette-style home sites. The county has never had an official set of criteria to evaluate contract applications and building approvals under Williamson.
The newly unveiled interim criteria have some cattle ranchers hopping mad. They say that even a $2,000 agricultural income threshold is too high. Rex Lindsay, of the Mt. Hamilton Range Improvement Association, said Monday that it would take 200 acres to produce that much income.
“It’s dangerous,” Lindsay said. “People [with 40 acres] will force more cattle on the land and damage the land.”
Derry said the proposal is “better, but it’s still not a correct figure for grazing and hay, which are two of the most prevalent crops on Williamson Act land.”
Gage said after the meeting that regardless of the criteria, parcels with legitimate agriculture enterprises may be able to stay in the act with, say, a productive cherry orchard of fewer than 10 acres, or large grazing collectives owned by several people with only 20 acres individually.
“The problem with doing things legislatively is they try to make it one size fits all,” he said. “You have to be flexible.”
The vast majority of the nearly 3,000 Williamson parcels in the county are related to non-prime land. Of the 1,172 that don’t meet minimum size requirements, 893 are non-prime. Of the 1,172 parcels, 501 have been developed.
The county first attempted to address its Williamson Act troubles in 2003 after an audit performed by the California Department of Conservation revealed the county’s failure to enforce the law.
An initial effort to non-renew some parcels was tabled after a huge public outcry, but the agriculture and planning offices instituted a new set of rules, including a $10,000 income figure, to apply to contract holders who want to build homes on their land.
In the last two years, the county has used those guidelines to deny home site approval to people whose land falls below the minimum parcel and income requirements. The denials angered landowners who believe county administrators have been legislating and enforcing rules selectively, and the conflict inspired the county to try once again to set official criteria.
“We have a lot of people caught in the middle of the pipeline,” Gage said. “They bought their land innocently and spent a lot of money and then couldn’t get a building permit. Those are the people I’m worried about.”
Realtors are pushing for a state-sponsored amnesty that would allow home builders an exemption from the onerous penalty that comes with cancelling a Williamson contract.
Efforts by Gage and Van Wassenhove to find state lawmakers willing to sponsor or back that legislation have been unfruitful. In an interview, Gage said that he doesn’t expect help from the state, but told the landowners at Monday’s meetings that “maybe there’s a compromise there someplace.”
Now that the proposed interim criteria have been endorsed by supervisors Gage and McHugh, they will be considered by the five-member board of supervisors later this month. If the criteria are approved, they will be used to evaluate each of the county’s existing Williamson contracts.
Under a timeline presented Monday by Van Wassenhove, a stakeholders group of ranchers, Realtors and open space interests convened in February will meet again this summer to draw up final recommendations for treating existing contract holders. Van Wassenhove, Lindsay and Derry are all members of that task force.
Under the timeline, the board of supervisors would adopt final contract guidelines in October and authorize the county planning office to issue non-renewal notices based on parcel size. All landowners would have the opportunity to demonstrate why they should be allowed to remain in the act. All contracts that do not meet requirements would be formally non-renewed in November 2006.
County supervisors will also vote later this month whether to suspend the county’s Williamson Act program and not accept new contract applications for one year, or until it has finalized contract criteria.
“We have a lot of issues to deal with,” Derry said. “I’m happy they’re not going to accept new contracts. It seems ludicrous to accept people into a system that is so messed up.”
Target dates
For Williamson Act Reform
October 2005
• Adopt guidelines to non-renew non-compliant parcels
• Establish a new Agriculture preserve Map
• Adopt criteria to transfer properties from Williamson Act to Open Space Easement Act
January 2006-July 2006
• Issue notice of non-renewal of non-compliant contracts and consider protests
October 2006
• Finalize non-renewal
November 2006
• Amend county Williamson Act ordinance to reflect policy changes
