Monday, April 02, 2018
Clean and Green: Pennsylvania taxpayers pick up the tab left by large landowners
Suspicious me wonders if the elected officials at the time knew "exactly" what they were doing...
Steve Esack and Riley Yates reported on this on the Allentown, Pa. Morning Call newspaper website:
"The law — commonly known as Act 319 or Clean and Green — offers steeply discounted “preferential” assessments to owners of farms and other large undeveloped tracts. It’s an inducement to keep them from selling to builders. The discounts work by basing assessments on what the land is worth as a working farm or woodlot, and not its value if sold on the real estate market.
Those discounts cut property taxes not only for mom-and-pop farmers, but also for millionaires living in country estates, and golf courses, quarries and other non-agriculture businesses. The discounts are not free, either. Their cost is shifted to other people and businesses in those same communities, who foot higher property tax bills to cover the lost revenue to schools, counties and municipalities.
That reality has quietly turned Clean and Green into one of Pennsylvania’s largest taxpayer-backed subsidy programs year after year, according to a 10-month investigation by The Morning Call. And there is little oversight or monitoring of the program."
