MICHELLE WILLARD, Post Staff Writer
Posted: Wednesday, September 2, 2009 8:30 am

A 1976 Tennessee law to help lower the tax burden on the family farm has helped some evade property taxes for years.

“It’s a big, huge mess,” Rutherford County Property Assessor Bill Boner said.

The mess is Tennessee’s Greenbelt Law, a.k.a., the Agricultural, Forest and Open Space Land Act of 1976, which taxes farm land at a lower rate than improved property.

“It’s to protect the farmers and if you look at the farms that have been annexed (by cities) those farmers can keep their land,” said Boner, who also owns Cripple Creek Farms.

In the 1970s, Tennessee farmers were having a tough time paying their taxes and selling off family land to make ends meet, he explained.

“Back then they couldn’t have paid the taxes … now they can afford their taxes,” Boner said.

The law also was passed to combat urban sprawl and and for “the preservation of open space … for sound, healthful, and well-planned urban development, that the economic development of urban and suburban areas can be enhanced by the preservation of such open space.”

But sprawl has continued and created cracks for properties to slip through.

Since Boner took office, he has reviewed all the Greenbelt properties and sent letters to the more than 3,600 parcels on the list with about 2,500 responding so far.

He asked property owners to prove their land still meets Greenbelt qualifications.

His review has resulted in about 270 properties being reclassified and pulled off the Greenbelt.

“Some of them are old,” Boner said, “and have been on (the Greenbelt) for around 15 years and some of it’s just been a year of two.

“It’s all over the county from one end of the county to the other,” he added.

Boner said some of the properties were farmland that was sold and was not pulled off of the Greenbelt and “some of it just slipped through the cracks.”

Those cracks have cost the county a pretty penny.

Greenbelt properties are not taxed by their fair market value, like a house is. But instead are taxed according to the potential profit they can create for their owners as farmland using “sound farming or forestry practices,” the law said.

In Rutherford County, the law reduces the tax burden of Greenbelt properties by 33 percent on average, according to a Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations report released earlier this year.

When a property is removed from the Greenbelt, owners are responsible for paying back taxes for three previous years.

Overall, Boner’s reclassifications will result in more than $780,000 being paid to the county in back taxes, he said.

Michelle Willard can be contacted at 615-869-0816 or mwillard@murfreesboropost.com.