the council's committee on budget and financial come to order this is our meeting of march ninth two thousand and fifteen present at today's committee meeting is members mis discussion on b f seventy or under the heading of despaired of real property assessments for agricultural vs not agricultural lands what we have before we do the normal  testimony i'm going to have the division real property from the department of finance give a short presentation first and then we are going to do  decorum safe you disturb this meeting you'll be asked to leave this chambers and have no problem and foreseen that  classifications based upon b f seventy relating to the proposed agricultural assessments  this bill should replace the current agricultural use and dedication programs with a new direct dedication only program i'm sure you can read along with me must commit to an agriculture operation for five ten or twenty years the agricultural dedications are filed with the assessment division the agricultural dedications are therefore recorded at the state of conveyances which ultimately gives the public notification that the parcel is in  place dated a cultural use and dedication values with market values do right from the market as currently proposed a five year dedication fifty percent discount of market that land value at ten twenty percent and a twenty year at two percent that is just what is propose and ultimately the reason for this bill going back to two thousand and one when we were trying to address this restore you know for many in fairness to home currently there are four thousand seven hundred seventy nine parcels receiving the subsidy for agricultural the county wide subsidy is on the bottom right and nineteen point two million dollars there are currently four thousand one hundred forty five or eighty seven percent of the parcels receiving the subsidy are in the agricultural use program and she has a subsidy on a year to year b this is the picture of mali island showing the agriculture use a values this is the all the parts of that are non dedication in the program and are much more common as you can see there ag use values in every district is seventy six to improve the home side valuation disparity between parcels receiving the agricultural production benefit and parcels not eligible for the benefit here we have a parcel in cola which has two point two five acres and a quarter acre home site with a modest home and has diversified farming on its proximity to a curse on the right you show a parcel and cal tax this next example is the same two parcels being compared but without the homeowner again the tax burden for the property without the agriculture subsidy is significantly higher even though they have similar homes and a similar sized home site currently homesites within parcels with agricultural use are valued as a portion of the larger parcel not as a stand alone home site this example shows the current lack of uniformity in the current methods of valuing home sites these three parcels are located within a half mile i mean each other in the cool area example one as a standalone half acre site and pays over two thousand dollars a year in taxes for in land value of three hundred fifty six thousand dollars example two is a half acre portion of an agriculture part parcel with three point seven eight years they pay six hundred thirty dollars in taxes for the home site each year the last example is a half acre portion of an agricultural use parcel that is fifteen point six acres this half acre home site is valued at fifty five thousand and consequently pays three hundred twenty two dollars in taxes for the land home site comparable vacant land sales are used to value stand alone half acre sites b f seventy proposes to use a similar approach to value home sites for parcels receiving agriculture dedication in this example a cool half acre home site would be valued at three hundred twenty four thousand and her b f seventy this is the value that would be applied to all agriculture dedication halfacre homesites and  regardless of the size of the nother mother parcel this new process will restore parity between parcels who do and do not have agriculture  production this next example shows the application of b f seventy it gives an example of what the tax is with each of the three dedication options and the home site this parcel is four point seven nine acres it has a half acre homesite and four point two nine acres in pasture use at a ten year dedication without agriculture evaluation this parcel would be valued at eight hundred eleven thousand nine hundred dollars and would pay four thousand seven hundred fifty eight dollars a year in taxes real property taxes currently it's got a ten year dedication and it has a subsidy of two hundred two thousand eight hundred eighty six dollars which reduces the taxes to one thousand eight hundred seventy one dollars per year that's the second column under b f seventy the home site value would increase from fifty seven thousand five hundred dollars to three hundred twenty four thousand dollars and the agriculture values would change based upon the type of dedication with the twenty year dedication providing the biggest benefit in all three b f seventy scenarios the subsidy would be less than it is currently and when comparing the current proposed ten year dedication the subsidy will drop by one thousand eight hundred twenty five dollars this is the same property but the calculations are with the homeowner exemption and rate the tax changes are less pronounced in the homeowner class the tax difference between the two ten year dedication scenario is eight hundred sixty six dollars the difference between the current program and the five year dedication is one thousand and fifty four dollars this is an example of a nine point one acre parcel that has a five point one acre homesite and four acres of agricultural parcels that have larger home sites or where the agriculture use is a smaller portion of the site may not experience a change in home site value and or b s seventy five acre home site will be valued similar to five acre parcels in the area in this example the difference between the current program and the ten year dedication is three hundred forty nine dollars the difference between the current program and the twenty year dedication is thirty four dollars parcels used entirely for agricultural purposes will see tax increases if they convert to a five or ten year dedication and these are parcels without homes for parcels with a current twenty year dedication taxes are not expected to change much if they continue with the twenty year dedication and conclusion seventy requires that parcels be dedicated to receive the agriculture tax benefit agriculture evaluations will be based upon fractions of market value and therefore will be kept up to date systematically dedications will be recorded at the state providing public notice to prospective buyers and finally b f seventy promotes fairness and improves the valuation disparity between home sites that are similar in size as posted you have three minutes to share your thoughts and three minutes only you do not have a minute clued so in your name comes up these come forward state your name for the record of representing an organization please share that with us and so we'll start with our district offices on office is there anyone wishing to provide testimony raised five kids on the farm we've got two of them on the far right now with their kids so when we say we're a family farm i really want to mean that we're farming families on our farm and we gauge our success by how many grad gets we've got and how many how often we get to see them every day actually one of them the four year old already saying that the farm is hers member of the molly coffee association on the board of twenty million dollars from the federal government through the farm bill every year to give away as competitive grants to people who do so seeing a blighted culture and research and education in that field  folks to do is make it easier for us to raise kids on the farm somehow we need to grandfather in this bill families that have been farming all their lives forty two years on the farm and make one hundred percent of their more bed and breakfast on last i don't think that the solution in that way this bill is maybe going to backfire and we need to take a real close look at it we need to base our tax maybe maybe we need to base our tax on the percentage of total income that you get from pharmacy and you guys take it from there thank you very much a lot thank you for any questions for grow in our land we consider this a right of ours is living in hawaii and i believe that taking ag land out of the nation which is what this bill will probably do in many cases i don't think that's just a money issue i think it's threatening therefore taxes are lower you choose an agricultural way of life like others are born or said we're raising our children there we're giving them a way to have a feasible future maybe they won't be as affluent with money as other people but they can afford to stay on their land and keep their lifestyle once again family farming is is our chosen way of life why it seems like the right place to do it and i don't see i don't see what this bill should should force us to to change this and fair solution for raising operating funds the current bill being of seventy as it currently exists will cause many people to lose their properties due to proposed market value based it is outrageous to think that our governing elected officials gave them so and the increase in salaries well they are taxing people off their land and it is clear that we import more than eighty five percent of our food to the island of maui basing the assessment at full market value it would be impossible for small farmers to continue farming during licht officials care about food production being local everyone benefits do they really want to tax a lot of farmers who suffer a poor season of crop production their income dropped from twenty five hundred dollars most of th subsistence farmers in the east now we are also producing food reaches neighbors and friends the provision for your agricultural land dedication program does not encourage the continuation of farming on a small scale i believe this is wrong on healthy for a well balanced community has this committee lost respect and appreciation for those who choose to produce a product that will benefit the tourist industry opening the tentacle gardens an arboretum is not only in the educational and recreational institutions but eggplant it allows local students and visitors and outdoor classroom this combined with the growing of edible fruits and vegetables sold within the community help to sustain the property and feed thirty who live within the system and this kind of teaching tool of the environment cannot exist commercially and residentially zoned areas where better to provide thousand and fourteen figure out how to manage within your budget without taking small farmers on this island farmers to contribute to the welfare of our community as a whole what you have come up with is not the product of the farming parcel it really loses the fact that a lot of our property isn't even usable as farming it's you're not going to be able to but i mean you could put a subdivision in there i guess if you wanted to but we don't want that no one wants to he r we made the choice when we came here to tread lightly we did the move didn't we didn't start up our chainsaw for the first two months we cut down hundreds of large trees  because we wanted to keep the peace and quiet of the neighborhood and change things we wanted to move towards the hawaiian lifestyle more of the older hawaiian lifestyle as much as we can learn it we didn't want to bring ours in we didn't have the money to do a whole lot of it either the twenty five hundred dollars revenue minimum for this doesn't account for the fact that it takes fairly long time for fruit trees and all to start producing we're are what are we getting off our property you know a little bit aloha from the valley that we've had in our experimental crops that we're able to share with people and a whole lot of investment that we're putting into it both labor and money for example our first soil test told us that we needed ten tons of canned tones of coral limestone per acre to get our ph up to six we were looking to find a coral reef when you have to find alternative methods and we're doing those that are very labor size is just really doesn't address the real problems in the tax assessment i won't deny there are quite a few problems in the tax schemes but i would agree with theresa christiansen good morning chair good morning council members and members of the audience my name is alex holler and i'm from and i'm a financial analyst if our representatives and board and commission members understood theories of finance such as time value of money we would be able to eliminate a lot of inefficiencies that exist within our government codes that align with time value of money would eliminate a lot of these inefficiencies in the ag real property tax assessments our county and state representatives should be required to take a crash course college level and throw to finance class they would learn a lot over three months and they would be able to identify and eliminate any fish and seize that exist within our government if you appropriate if you appropriate taxpayer dollars then you should be required to take a class that would educate you on the most efficient methods of finance our state and county government should hire professor larry gorman who has a ph d in finance to teach our representatives these theories district t following him show be like to speak extemporaneously from my heart so i've written from my heart as a very important issue i feel very fortunate to have been working with a group of citizens the ag working group individuals in this group are deeply experience with growing food coffee flowers ranching and be keeping this group has met four times between the last hearing we had on b f seventy for a total of twelve hours with fifteen individuals that's a and norma's amount of time and i bring that forward to reveal the respect for which we treat this issue and this council  each paragraph sentence and word of b s seventy has been examined with a long view of how the changes to the current code with the future of agriculture the seventy has no positive effects for agriculture and will put the potentially devastating for the future of agriculture on maui as all of you know i've been dedicated my life energy toward a growing solution for need to have more food grown on maui food security jobs agriculture industry it can all be revitalized in the years that i've been working out i've seen very strong positive steps many from this county council we're just at the point now where the soil has been prepared for this future of agriculture this bill would be very would be very hard to feel that it would be a blow to the preparation it would be a blow for the people that are putting their life into agriculture for the as we've heard for forty years thirty years twenty years i dream of agriculture as a growth industry a growing agriculture economy means jobs not just jobs as farmers an entire industry that benefits tourism develops manufacturing opportunities while creating food security for maui island this council has a history of supporting agriculture on maui i requested the council vote no to change the maui county ag rate land tax code parker i also have to read my testimony i've never testified before i'm hoping that since i'm not one of the usual suspects he'll be paid even more attention i represent my three voters and one who will be a voter as soon as he is a citizen first let me say that i agree the tax regulations do need to be we all know people who have ag status and don't really do anything agricultural the county needs revenue and we need more clarity about how the tax rates are defined however these new regulations and penalties will make large corporate i would cultural businesses very happy since this bill will eliminate many small farmers from compact young people with a few acres and a vision will find the regulations impossible our family has owned three point one five acres of land in haiku since only two thousand and eight it had been a pineapple farm and then a horse farm but it had been neglected for several years in two thousand and twelve we planted hundreds of native trees and plants with the assistance of the reforestation hawaii initiative of the us de u s d a as our investment in the future of hawaii and in our family our son and his partner present here live on the property and are developing it with us we have continued since then to plant and nurture native plant seeds and seedlings as well as bananas coconuts pious many different types of sugarcane and other productive species i have a list which i will that touched my testimony is this even going to qualify as a as a real farm am i going to have to put in a business plan to get a twenty year designation we're off the grid and require no electrical infrastructure nor water from the state or the county we have forty thousand gallons and four water tanks as a catchment system for our ohana this huge financial and personal work investment will not pay real dividends for at least another five years and the bulk of the investment will require decades before the trees will be sale we may be able to make twenty five hundred a year at this point from seed seedlings bananas and coconuts but most of our trees are too young to produce much and we need to spend a lot of time mauling eliminating invasive species protecting well for growing from insects and rodents we use organic methods we are still clearing and planting native species it was relatively easy for us because we came with money to build a house we had a couple of rundown buildings and first storing equipment and camping my husband we didn't i didn't have to make a living but zar young people to start with a jungle and make a farm with your own labor and a few pieces of equipment is hard enough required to prove that you are making everybody to prove it will make money some day to ask permission to add a few chickens or gullets and then have to pay the back back taxes and penalties if you fail you'd have to be a fool to take that i know more diversity with more people provides more survivability for more people on mars species diversity will be even more needed as the climate change please consider taking more time farm i'm also a member of the maui county farm bureau and i've been on that bureau for twenty five years i too think that the abusers of the ag use value says to be stopped but this bill as written will hurt struggling small farmers and likely put many out of business i'm opposed to it in its entirety at this point i don't think many council members have a full understanding of how difficult it is to be in farming although things are beginning to improve in two thousand and eight there was a general collapse of the ornamentals market and what we have seen since then are steady increases in the cost of all of our materials fertilizers chemicals nursery supplies insurance at a time when the prices we can get for our products have actually fallen add to that the expensive storm repairs and cleanups that have happened already this year since december and we're really paying a lot of money to stay in business you can ask any farmer they will tell you the same thing how many farmers who live in the country don't have county services like water and electricity and we have to provide that for ourselves at great cost so the agricultural rate is appropriate everyone everyone recognizes that agriculture is important for maui but we need to support for the ag has to be more than just empty  words we were able to stay in business partly because the county supports agriculture such as through this current valuation policy regarding the dedication process first we're all getting much older we don't know what's to happen to us in the future and we will be hesitant to tie up our farm dedication for twenty years the way that the committee or the commission that would be set up under the bill to regulate us once dedicated is flawed as a twenty five year member of the farm bureau i need to inform you that the farm bureau now represents mostly a few large corporations several of the board members representing small farmers and ranchers have resigned out of frustration i do not trust this current farm bureau to make nominations that are in the interests of diversified agriculture on maui i also believe that a commission and for that matter a director of finance being empowered to decide which crops that are legal a farmer can or cannot grow is something that will be found unconstitutional this bill that passed as written will likely find its way to the hawaii supreme court there's another problem these are complicated issues i strongly believe that it would be best to leave the real property tax code the way it is and look for other ways to catch the gentleman's the state's perhaps better ag and specs would be a way to accomplish this haiku been there for about thirty years and the bill itself even after the presentation i can't say that i fully understand it it's pretty complicated but what i can say is that  this looks like a nightmare of unintended consequences i've got a farm in haiku it's twenty six acres and my son's living on it right now and we chose not subdivided to leave it as a farm it's got some old point houses on it has me and right now he's on his back o clearing it to plant maybe about three hundred fifty coconut palms and we were thinking about going into dedication and this just threw a wrench in the works another unintended consequence is i've got three rentals on that property and as the expenses go up for landlords hurricane insurance taxes you know all kinds of expenses rents are you luck didn't lee have to be raised some time and with the amount of agricultural properties on the island that have houses on them the first thing i see happening is rents going up another question i have and i have a lot of experience in this is dealing with the county of mouth ok it takes a long time to do anything and how they could possibly if this law was passed or a new law similar to it the amount of property owners that would have to go through a protocol that would then have to be processed by the county in my estimation you're looking at years i mean any kind of permit i just picked up a building permit this morning that took me four and a half months  you know i have other permits waiting some of them taking years so i just see a huge backlog of you know papers and you know you know work that's just i don't think the county could handle it i agree with the previous speaker and that let's instead of creating new complicated laws with unintended impacts let's enforce the laws we have spent some of that money hire a couple of inspectors and you know get out to these farms and you know see what's what and you know enforce the laws that you have to find equity not try to create something that they're going to be a hardship for a lot of meaning chair committee everyone else is saying it so perfectly i don't really need to go into it other than please consider what you're doing here the complications that are making the difficulty and that you would be creating with this law for small farmers i am a member of the cool looking unity association and we are one of the main areas of farming we have a lot of small farmers i have a small orchard i have no intentions of doing commercial farming but i have farmed for twenty seven years on the island of hawaii and i know that you do it because you love it you're not doing it to make money and to increase the burden on small farmers is just wrong so i just ask this committee to please reconsider what you're doing open a conversation with more ideas and creativity as to how you can make the rules and  seven zero until you have had the opportunity to speak with those that will be directly affected if this is not possible i will stand firm in opposition upby of seven zero i am not a farmer neither do i intend to farm as the work is too hard the hours are too long and the challenges are many the extent of produce for me is patronizing our local economy and visiting the local farmer markets i am not here to challenge the contents of what is written in the current draft but only to ask that you speak to those within the true ag community to further discuss the long term effects of b f seven zero it is reassuring to know that based on a press release dated march six and agricultural dedication and pfizer a committee consisting of community members actively engaged in agriculture will also be considered as wine gets better with age everything gets better with time so i urge for the sake of all farmers and ranchers who engage in an honest day's work to please that this happens i understand that at the end of the day you remain the policymaking body and many of these people and their families remain hard working individuals that provide food for this community we all have differences of opinions but i know all of you well enough to end on this note you are good people and i aloha morning my name is pat nod i am vice president of the cool community association the cool looking unity association opposes b f seventy for the following reasons the bill would assess ever cultural land at fair market value not value such a change will encourage the loss of ag land and does not support farming to the bill requires a gross income of twenty five hundred to be able to dedicate land which does not support subsistence farming and is inconsistent with the county add water consumer requirement three the bill creates an add dedication advisory commission or committee to be used when the property owner disagrees with a decision made by the director such a commission or committee should be representative of more than farm bureau members and should not be used only by the finance department for penalties for failure to complete a dedication period are so severe as to deter dedication instead of encouraging it five without more community input and study the county has no way of knowing how many farmers will choose to dedicate and at what level causing unknown problems for expected tax revenue the cooler community association is in favor of using qualified agriculturally knowledgeable inspectors to assess every cultural land by the use value method including knowledgeable inspectors at the assessment step is the most efficient way to ensure that the county collects the correct tax prevents fraud and makes every cultural tax rate available to all those who know it county has determined are to receive it the cool looking initio solicitation is in favor of continuing to encourage ever cultural lands to be dedicated through a reduction of assessed value calculated in the value the cool community association supports the council reviewing how tax policies affect the agricultural community and long term prospects for agriculture in mali county we are in support of efforts that will bring to gather our ag community the council and the administration to work on improvements to our agricultural tax of council members aloha chair my name is sidney smith i'm the president of the maui coffee association and a member of the ag working group today i'm speaking for the ag working group we have spent three years with various draft versions of this bill and we have sought community and put interviewed farmers and ranchers and have studied this bill from every angle today you see a lot of people in the gallery i would like to ask those in the galleries that do not support b of seventy it is the collective opinion of the ag working group that the adoption of market value instead of ag use value will be disastrous to maui county agriculture every state in the nation uses ag use value farmers and ranchers  lease land will not be able to pay the higher lease rents that will have to be collected to pay the tax farmers whose average age is sixty or too old to sign up for twenty year dedications the five and ten year options will still result in taxes quadrupling quintupling and jumping even higher than that in principle the ag working group supports dedication we strongly support drafting portions of the bill with input from the ag community there is far too much authority of the director over farmers and ranchers and what he can and cannot grow or raise only the farmer knows what suits his or her land best we urge the council to call for an independent study to show the true  packs of this to maori counties farmers and citizens once done it will be difficult if not impossible to undo land that has been in families for generations will be sold passage of b of seventy will result in even less of portable housing than there is now the maui county ireland plan contains a clear strong will and implementing actions surrounding support for local agriculture our state plans community plans and other sections of my county code likewise provide a foundation and framework for retaining ag lands and striving for more self sufficiency on the surface the language would be of seventy would appear to address some of those schools but in reality it would bring about a number of unintended consequences that are clearly contrary to the goals of preserving and enhancing our ability to support our county agriculture hiring knowledgeable ag and specters could solve a majority of the problems that plague the real property tax division and could eliminate the so called cheats who have unfairly taken advantage of the ag use value system we strongly urge the council to fund the hiring of qualified knowledgeable ag and specters and leave the real property tax code as is thank you thank you for it this morning in the questions members thank you you growers association and members of the ag working group recently the ag working group was asked by a county department director why should we have add on maui he went on to ask when we can buy bananas at cosco why should we grow ad why should we grow them here he was asking because he wanted to know why ag should get a different water rates than other maui citizens and i'm guessing that there are those here who are wondering why a zoned properties to get a different tax rate than fair market value since you will hear plenty of compelling reason to either defer or preferably oppose b f seventy i thought i would answer the question and remind you why agriculture on maui is important is a prominent part of the maui island plan why ag land is currently protected by both the plan the planning department code and the current tax code number one is food security we live on a small island thousands of miles away from other food sources agriculture provides food and supports our ability to be sustainable is food freshness and food safety when we grow our own food we have much greater control over the quality of what we're eating three minimizing invasive species when we produce our own agricultural products we minimise the invasive species that come to our agricultural properties that come with imports jobs agriculture requires a huge amount of labor and thus provides jobs to many of mallory's citizens diversity always long growing in season and climate support a wide variety of food and flowers and few some that are not excuse me found in other places education and research diverse range of large and small farms and numerous farmer organizations provide you meant education on leading edge agricultural practices beauty and charm the open space brute stands charming and you know farm settings of malaise countryside not only soothes the so maui's visitors but also melis locals tourism people come to maui for the ocean and the landscape a landscape maintained by agricultural lands culture agriculture is on maui is a way of life that goes back hundreds of years it's not part of the culture agriculture is integra to hawaii's culture ag is hard work and doing it on some of the world's most expensive land with numerous restrictions laws requirements and rollback penalties has few  payoffs when you add up all the costs of delivering these benefits providing agriculture on maui is for the most part an affordable and unprofitable even with the current ag tax rates most of us are farmers and ranchers because we believe in the benefits and because we want to support the overall wellness of maui county and its citizens by providing the fruits of our labors for everyone to enjoy that last sentence if you're to wondering why maui county should support agriculture the answer is because local agriculture death the property tax when see it in hand two thousand and ten and now it's fourteen we each the value came to forty six thousand dollar person who raises the lion i know they have three guys change since in the park over there nobody ever called look how do they operate something like that the valley is problem is that i can land in the valley in the back was actually culture guess what they changed the conservation and i'm paying twenty cents more on a thousand use value for our property and for the properties of other farmers and ranchers on maui the passage of this bill would be dishonest risk for the future of agriculture in my only county my farmers and ranchers are some of the most hard working people on this island we spend many hours working our land and livestock in order to provide nutritious food for the people on maui with a high cost of feed fuel seed fertilizers etc most of us are barely making  farmers yet we continue because we value what we do and what we provide to this community and b if seventy b would be one more nail in the khalfan for maui farmers and ranchers if the ag use value for property taxes is eliminated most if not all of us will be will not be able to continue farming as the property taxes on our land will be just too high to afford them there are many other changes proposed by this bill which would all have a disastrous effect on farming and ranching farmers and ranchers and now i need help not hindrance let's find some other way to find revenue other than targeting hard working farmers and ranchers i particularly support the provision that would assess the value of agricultural homesites independently from the agricultural areas that that are there based on the highest and best use of similar lands as was described in the in the opening point someone has a house and they have a home site the value of that home site should be comparable to home sites of the same area the same size in that area that is only fair and it corrects a fundamental miscalculation that has been applied as part of our tax code for more than thirty years assessing one taxpayer as little as twenty five thousand dollars for his quarter acre home site for example  and another taxpayer in the same area two hundred fifty thousand dollars for his quarter acre is not fair and equitable and in fact it's unconstitutional no one challenged it to date because most of the people are getting a benefit from a life but  it really is unconstitutional to treat people in equitably that way the other part of this measure which is where most of this the comments are coming from which is is advocation the way to differentiate between and the gentleman farmer well that's a much more complicated issue and it's one for this for this body to discuss but it's really a policy issue is what it is it's what are we going to support for agriculture are we only going to support you know large agricultural tracks or are we going to support the smaller farmers and in what way are we going to do that it's a complex policy decision that i would like to hear you know the  committee discuss in in full but it's very important to understand that every parcel in the agricultural district is supposed to have agriculture as its primary use and the way that we do that  county is we say you have to give us a farm plan showing that fifty percent of the land is being put to agricultural use now that is not necessarily commercial agriculture and that is not necessarily an agricultural use that producing a product but it puts a sink informant's with state law to say fifty percent of the land so therefore a majority of this of this lot is in agricultural use now all of those properties do they deserve the county to be subsidizing them if you will with with lower property tax rates again a policy decision for you to make on the other hand someone who is who's who's planting something making a product of delivering that product to market and it is truly a farmer well then that's i think that's a different definition and i think you need to you need to figure out what that definition is under the current application of our code we're spending nineteen point one million dollars subsidizing people's taxes in this way the question is can a portion or all of that nineteen million dollars be spent in a better way discussion and i'm happy to be part of it thank you thank you for your will be followed by jerry ross and the departments this measure will have far reaching consequences for our industry we need to work together to develop a measure that is fair and beneficial to all the issue of ensuring ag discussed in actual operations has been identified as in many cases it is the details that is challenging how do we accomplish the intent of this measure we're not losing existing operations as an unintended consequence such as the passing on of higher property taxes by too late seized by landowners who choose not to dedicate can parties agree to collaborate to reach our resolution on the other methods to a common accomplish the intended goal such as rules zoning a core issues h preserve historically important agricultural lands for through that production in areas such as school i'm highly central and other parts of the colony these are multi generational operations significant investments employees and families depended on the operations these commercial farms and ranches at two mahler's economy these are lands that we can all agree should be kept in agricultural production there was a question of parity in tax rates with other use patterns currently there is an ag provided for internet and transportation despite the p u c required compensatory rate structure the state legislature felt that a state constitution and its recognition of agriculture justified a preferential rate structure for florida industry we request that the colony recognize commercial agriculture status as did the state legislature intent that maintain maximum acres in commercial agricultural production we agreed to abort broadening of the membership of the agricultural dedication advisory committee a range of members experienced in the needs of long term agriculture commitment is testimony any questions for the gentleman in the space yes i think it tear and thank you mr would not be for being here this morning you raise something that really piqued my interest we heard from an earlier testifier about the possibility of all of the lines and in this particular instance young brothers whether it's a c l or a container or if you have to carry its own weight you know since you know it had to cover its own costs and so far bill went in appealing to the state legislature and the legislature did not grant that it is not specifically in the p c has discretion they still have that discretion and so you know it you know you make next is jerry ross and you'll be followed by a net  my name is jerry ross of farms and i'm a vegetable farming farmer and coolum with my wife we've been growing fruit vegetables and coffee for people in mali for over ten years before that my father in law good corn and asparagus for twenty five years the seventy in its current form have a very negative impact on our farm now we county is trying to adhere to the challenge which seeks to double local food production by twenty thirty i don't see how that will happen if farmers have to pay taxes on the market value of their property on we give you a quote unquote break and only tax you at twenty percent of market value additionally only the twenty year dedication provides a motive but for our family we would have to farm into our eighty's in order to recognize this break and not have to pay if seventy removes the option to dedicate a few condominium eyes your property my ninety year old mother in law recently condominium eyes the property we farm so that her children might have a share of her legacy when she passes dollars a year which is pretty similar to what would happen if we are farm had to pay market value taxes without dedication qualified farm inspectors would have been able to spot this in equity right away and save  significant house on a fairly major tax if passes as is we will never be able to dedicate because a property is condominium even though we have been farming and feeding people on maui for thirty five years we currently pay the two hundred fifty dollars minimum on our two acre property which is adjacent to the farm property and is an integral part of the operation at current market value assessment we would have to pay one thousand nine hundred dollars at the highest historic land value in two thousand and eight we'd have to pay forty two hundred dollars i urge you to defer this bill in to you can properly assess the impact this will have on farmers and we counted i'm all for providing incentives preservation of farmland encouraging young farmers i'd be glad to add my voice to help you craft name is annette niles i'm a rancher a farmer and i'm also on my comment and i want to keep up you know we have a lot of testimony here and you know i don't want to repeat myself my point was on  i believe in dedication you know and so did my parents but the dedication was it was to give a break to the farmers and the ranchers when you dedicate this is going to kill the farmer in a rancher if  it's market value on a dedication you know and as far as the houses we have a lot might i go back to my property i have i have houses on my property that is rented to people that i can't afford to hire ok so i put them there to police my properties and help me in other ways where as i had to go to my other property down where i live now because i had a lot of test on their side i had to build and move down to the farm on the big part of the ranch and moved down there but in order for me to move down there i had to run two towers in feet of pipeline i had to pave the county road and i had to put up solar because i couldn't get the electric to where i needed to get it so my point is you know i understand you guys are looking at the market value of the homes and stuff like that but what would happen to me my tenants have cheap rent they would have to move and they would be homeless so i asked for you to defer this until we can work something where it would be feasible we understand that we're not trying to take on you know we  our best this this is what we do we farm a ranch you know so we need to have that little discount we don't we're not in why do we love hina you know they have jobs we really were on a farm we feed people you know so that of morning here council members my name is teresa thompson and my family's been ranching kula for over one hundred years i'm a fourth grade teacher at school and took a personal day to come down and be here today testify i'm also on the ag working group and who are our farmers and ranchers and we have studied versions of this bill in the past three years i would like to add that to please defer this bill i strongly support redrafting portions of this bill with the input from the ag community the adoption of the market value instead of i q spell you will be devastating to the county agriculture have done the math on a few dozen parcels and there will be an enormous jump in taxes for most some families will not be able to pay such outrageous tax assessments there's also the uncertainty of agri changes on us each year we're not guaranteed locked in at five dollars and eighty six cents per thousand dollars or for more than one year good morning council members already well i am a farmer in the y hay district i farm the excuse me i forgot that i'm blind and i do have to read i form the mac not orchards behind why a town i should say i'm attempting to farm i took over the backbone orchards behind my hay town only to have my request for the water denied by the state supported by testimony from the county for the water that that had been taken before but was not now appropriate in spite of that by sound farming practices we have managed to harvest over four hundred thousand pounds of mac nuts hundreds of pounds of bananas mangoes paez and started over five hundred fruit trees with most now just bearing fruit and hopefully will start to a very large vegetable farm all being sold and consumed on hawaii now in addition to my battle for water we have b f seventy to contend with on the on the surface i understand the intent i assume we want to catch the tax cheats who are building gentlemen estates and benefiting from lower tax bases because the ag land at their place the house sits on or not farming or engaging in ag practices tax the house not the farm my first comment is why do we need a new bill another set of laws on the books why don't we just hire educated ag and a vigil says inspectors who know farming operations when they see one and enforce the definition of ag land and keep it from market rate designations we've been catching the tax cheats all along we may not be in this situation while we will be only why are we going to be the only county i know of that wants to use market rate instead of the great use value my plan is currently dedicated for twenty years but i guess i have to start all over again at sixty one i don't think that's appropriate i think you can tax the land and the home and catch the tax cheats and why should i be told by a director which crops i can and cannot grow the bill doesn't address if he is he or she going to be a better farmer than i who live and die by it seven days a week bill doesn't address subsistence farmers they should not be penalize for not wanting not making some minimum economic threshold value while still providing food for their families and their grandchildren i don't know ranching but i bet my friends up country have a tough time grazing cattle to meet that number of twenty five hundred dollars a year minimum b f seventy wants a dedication advisory committee instead of appointing nine by one agency to be approved by the mayor i think each area as a council members represent each area of the county should be represented for i am not a member of the farm bureau or any other organization at this point i think that we all need to be able to get our coverage we did make sure every genre forming and geographic area of mali are covered b if seventy suggested by designation big taken away from me if i don't have sufficient water in my case i'm put in a catch twenty two you already took it away from me in my infinite wisdom i decided not to get anyone and how so how can i win that battle be if seventy should not be the vehicle to harm any real farmer as it seems to be doing the people who want to cheat will still attempt to do so i repeat hire folks who know ag from non ag and then force them accordingly and let's keep and get molly self sustaining as it should and could be i can't speak to the consequences for my crystal ball has been shattered a long time ago but it seems to me this bill in its present form will hurt more farmers and their workers th guys who are cheating the county out of the tax dollars i can i know i can speak for the twenty five families that help me on our farm i help support them with work on the farm most of who are not qualified so more homeless before i hired them half of them or drug or alcohol addicts and they're clean now if they weren't working for me they would be without housing and be on welfare just another burden for the county thank you for your time thank you for your t local restaurants and grocery stores my husband and i have very ambitious plans to grow the business my mom's been doing it for ten years and we just started we officially two months ago i would strongly urge you to do for b f seventy the way that it is written will have a very negative impact on agriculture having been on both sides of the equation first as a landowner trying to place farmers on land and now being a farmer trying to lease land the b f seventy will greatly reduce the availability of land for new and start up and small farmers very few landowners will dedicate their land for a long term period and certainly not for a start up farm my mom has been on a month to month agreement for seven years and this has been good for both the farmer and the land owner the current annual ag use exemption program works we need a better program to verify and validate real farms so people don't cheat the system condominium spews may have a hard time with is that condominium ization of a lot should not be an automatic reason for cancellation of the ag exemption we farm on a fifteen acre farm  condominium ised there is no house on this lot and we are just a farm we are so proud to be a second generation farmer my husband has been a farmer for his entire adult life and when the opportunity came along for us to take over my mom's farm we jumped a lot of people ask us why do we do this farming is hard and the egg business is just as it is even harder one we believe in producing local food for local people we want to raise our kids in the farming way of life and they want to continue my mom's legacy this is a way for us to provide income for our employees and we just feel that it is the right thing to do if you pass the f seventy the way that it is written there is a very high probability that we will lose our land lease because the holding costs for the land owner just won't make sense we are so excited about this opportunity we're going to take that away please go back to the drawing board and continue discussions thank you so much for your time thank you for your testimony this morning any questions for you thank you for your presence bob  done first i guess it was kind of interesting that they compared this we're going to home site valuation versus a house like i think a country and stuff i think that department knows this that there's a big big difference at times and as was mentioned earlier between valuation too if i'm pretty confident i can prove that for the past few years homesites and plots have been assessed as a separate piece compared to the acholi so that's something that the department has been doing illegally and they're trying to fix that fine but again i believe that has been done i realize that the department has a big job i've been in the grocery business since seventy six i've seen a lot of disparities on ag lots on urban lots it's a tough job to value on the prod basis what was missing i thought importantly from the presentation was the was the requirement for twenty five hundred dollars i was thought that the reason it was not a financial requirement and the state that it was it was illegal there would be a big legal challenge you can tell people what to do with their land but they tell me that you have to have so much i think that would you know offer a  the farmers who have followed the law based on county standards every administration there's a new director and planning there's a new change if it's an foresman issue and forced don't don't go crazy like a holes when there's really not a fl perma culture initiative resource and education center and haiku nonprofit organization there's been a lot of talk about all the different specifics and there are certainly a lot of them my head is swimming with confusing details about taxation and value and all this i don't know much about it i moved here twenty five years ago and i realized pretty soon in that even though i was in the state of hawaii i really i wasn't in the state of  i i was part of the i know and i've been studying what that even means and within our constitution and i was what we're trying to get here to what we're trying to learn from and i always used to think of us the land and i didn't even know what land was more and more understand that is everything that is within this rich biodiversity that includes  the animals the plants the microbes so whatever we can do to support that is really our directive so even if it's a tax code if the  is being preserved and being and being perpetuated in righteousness then the tax code is correct so that may not be the best way for you know for the corporate council or for the tax committee to to direct themselves but i think it should be the way they direct themselves so that's my little curveball for you all this morning thank you for your time thank you for your comments deryn strange and followed by joel richmond good morning arnie careful and committee members thanks for having us here this morning you know i used to write my testimony and think a lot about what i was going to say and then i would come and sit here for the twenty thirty minutes while everybody else would testify and then you'd have to change everything is going on so i tried something different i wasn't going to really decide what i wanted to say till i got here and pretty much everything as has been said you know i understand we're looking for fairness and in in the section three point four eight point two nine zero it states that the land will be assessed as a value for use without regard to any other value and you know which that's great but only if the land is classified and used and dedicated for agriculture and then a little later on the section three point four eight point three five one states landed a caitiff for twenty years shall receive a ninety eight percent discount from it fair market value and i don't know if those are if those are two separate things or if we're talking about the same thing so one of the problems with that is is that there's there's not a year to year dedication there's not a one year dedication and a lot of farmers that if have come to us since we've started these discussions are ranching and farming and year to year leases or even month to month leases pineapple land and pineapple is and isn't necessarily farming anything but we are and so i think there needs to be some mechanism for the for the tenant to dedicate with the owner consent you know how well the difference between those two sections and how you define market value effect or pineapple operation currently our parcel is valued at somewhere around three hundred thousand for a goose market value is somewhere between ten million and maybe i don't know twenty million dollars up there and so even a eighty percent discount on that is is going to cause not a percentage increase in our taxes but it will you know several orders of magnitude increase  the final thing i'd like to talk about is we keep bringing up these examples on the demonstration with the home sites in coffee in the home sites out in the country and i personally live out in and i know for a fact that i'm not receiving the same services on my half acre home site that folks in town are receiving and i know that because when the trees blocked the road to my house you know i went out and cut the trees out of the road and removed myself and there's a lot of  questions for the gentleman thanks for being here joe richman followed  good morning sure thank you for the opportunity to speak it's nice to live in a democracy where the people who make the rules actually listen to the people who are under them i hope you listen to the people who have spoken today i've learned a lot i hope you have condos i would like to speak about one specific part of the seventy which is section nine section nine and three which says that if you are a condo you're not eligible for dedication i think this is counterproductive if you take a look at land that's owned by multiple owner says tenants in common versus the same land this owned by condo owners there's no change in the land use it's only the change in the land ownership and if it's a condo the county actually gets more taxes from the land than if were owned by tenants in common it's not doesn't make any sense to a form of ownership affect the land use valuation wise the dedication not available to property has been condo many of my clients who are country do not have a lot of money and the only way they can keep their property is to sell part of it it's more the county tax break actually increases when count one property is condominium ised rather than when it's owned by tenants in common so one effect of denying dedication to kind of minimize land is to is to keep is to discourage property from being condominium eyes which will actually decrease the tax revenue i understand that the purposes of the b f seventy are to increase revenue to have equitable actually equitable taxation and to promote or at least not discourage farming it seems to me from listening here and from my little work as far as my expertise in real estate that this needs more work i hope that you listen to the people who have spoken today you pay attention and you do what's best for us thank you thank you very much for your testimony this morning bill bowen are followed by a summer star little chair whole comma members of the county council as most of you know my name is dale bowen our i've been involved in land conservation for over two decades much of which has been here in the hawaiian islands working on maui  during that time as director of the why and islands land trust previously maui coastal land trust we place more than seventeen thousand acres of land in permanent conservation perpetual not ten year not twenty year but perpetual it turned out all that was in the original a tenth of the organization that virtually all that land is agriculture it's over sixteen thousand of those acres are there permanent conservation the background idea behind this bill is a good one i live in an agricultural subdivision out of probably one hundred thirty maybe one hundred forty different two acre lots there i guess there's four to six people doing what you so i understand the challenge i understand that trying to find that equity there the bills background is a good idea the bills execution is not this bill throws out the baby with the back what bathwater and i think as you've heard from people who are real farmers here who are struggling working all the time i should point out that information from the office of economic development here says that the most recent data which is two thousand and twelve showed that the average farmer made minus over one thousand dollars i think the number was like minus one thousand one hundred seventeen dollars gross is fine twenty five hundred dollars that's gross but when you're losing money on the other side of it they're applying something like this from those tables at another four thousand dollars to that and and see how the little farmers are going to do little farmers work fourteen hours a day to come back and have to deal with all the paperwork to deal with the challenges  the through the county system the monitoring the enforcement is an incredible difficult one of the things this builds does not recognize are the lands which have been put in permanent conservation through the land trust it for the county to do it they can always condemn it minutes and the last point that i wanted to make here is that the preservation should be for permanence not just concerned with that short term recognize the nonprofit model recognize what land trust to that we are far more effective in that type of monitoring and enforcement than jurisdictions are a very similar bill this past in oregon back in the seventy's i believe it was the result is as others have said you're going to lose farms people are going to throw their hands up in the air i can't afford it i lose it that's how we're going to get more development they will get more affordable housing there's more development but you're not going to get moms please defer the bill work with some real small farmers in figuring out how to make it work thank you very much thank opposition of b f seventy board member was a former board member and secretary of the whole way you're going to farmers association member of the way farmer union family member of the county farm bureau and a former member of the food and energy security committee of maui tomorrow so while i recognize the intent of this proposed amendments in its current form these changes as you've heard would cause severe and irreparable damage to the community of our county which has been touched on before but these amendments do nothing for subsistence farming and they do nothing for the elderly who are the majority of our farmers at current who don't have the time to dedicate into the future clear example here that hasn't been touched on yet but you have the documentation for it was sent to you last night of how this measure lacks sufficient research loan your poco perhaps the poster child for why this bill is being introduced out of one hundred fifty two parcels one hundred  value thirty seven ag use call it two hundred one hundred eleven taxed market value thirty seven ag use so the original purpose of this measure was to protect local ag with all due respect it's doing exactly the opposite  we've been shown that most local family farms as mr boehner just said show up net negative at the end of the year so these operations in these families would be entirely unable to modify their operations to accommodate these changes as an agricultural policy consultant myself i must oppose the measure in its entirety and my suggestion would be to permanently abandon this particular measure as a vessel to address agricultural t which does need to be addressed as a solution i invite the real property tax division to collaborate with real agricultural experts to develop policy that won't permanently destroy agricultural lands in this hundred anniversary today and she's eighty seven years on the brain so i get some years yet to go i'm sixty years old but i aim to do it if this bill goes through there will not be one c from the file we don't lot of the bottom that's one whole different issue we give them the water you collect the money from the people we rescue high cause a lot of the great we collaborate with the community on how to make the community better always island plant where's mommy county has a policy to support agriculture and has committee to provide a policy direction that will enhance my always agricultural lands and protect contributes to our sense of place and he's a part of our island heritage my iconic nineteen point three zero eight point zero ten representing tent section b number to mitigate rising property values of farm lands to make agriculture use more economically fees if this passes it will flood the market with ag lands as owners will sell that going pop up years this is my life bill we have seventy is a fundamental change in land zoning on and and should be deferred until a number of significant problems can be resolved in collaboration with the wider community as part of an extensive public education effort using market value as a basis for a tax increase of agricultural lands is unfair burden on farmers and is contrary to the community goal of protecting agriculture many farmers simply will be unable to pay the higher tax and may be compelled to sell their land those who would meet the criteria for ag land to the cation placed themselves under the authority of the director of finance if i were to dedicate my land i would forfeit my ability to determine the quality and suitability of my land for production and to decide what crops are appropriate i would be required to allow entry to finance department inspectors without notice i find this in unacceptable invasion of my privacy and an assault on the independence and creativity i value as a farmer to understand the ramifications of these proposals i suggest that an independent examination be done to answer many remaining questions for example would undeveloped land without a home not currently active agriculture be assessed at market value if so this would precipitate widespread land sales and tragically set in motion a new era of dispossession for some there is a tenuous hold on family lands that once broken cannot be restored loss of these l denies future generations a life in farming as to the state lease lands are those state lease lands exempt from market value assessment if not it must be state ag lease land is by law already dedicated exclusively to agricultural use and is reviewed by the state for compliance additional county requirements would be bureaucratic excess additionally how does the dedication process function what kind of agricultural expertise would be required of the finance director commission members and ag inspectors to make decisions that affect the life and work of  farm what is the cost of this new bureaucracy and what is the appeal process thank you very much protect and support agriculture thank you for your testimony this morning we  sixteen hour days where you have to have a level of government require compliance there's a process of submitting showing up for a hearing a painting in approval every time you want to make a change is not something that should be introduced in a free society i happen to have the misfortune of being born in soviet union and even though i do not have a crystal ball i'll try to paint a very vivid picture for you of what happens when the government tells the farmers what to grow and how to grow it as a term of that for a new century ukraine where i was born was the bread have collapsed same thing will happen on the small island of maui if you destroy this absolutely essential fabric of small individual firemen not only the farming will be destroyed as it is it will be  i thank you for having us this morning chairman council members audience thank you so much i am here this morning as the owner operator of the maui mountain coffee farm it's a small farm up in a linda and i just wan state briefly that when i arrived on maui fifteen years ago i was looking for a farm because that's what i had lived in a place that was too hot and then too cold in maui is just right so i came here bought the farm i was embrace association and i'm actually going to speak for the association in just a moment we have been spending the last fourteen years trying to do exactly what we thought is our mission here which is to increase agricultural production on maui to raise the awareness of coffee throughout the whole why on islands we've been working very very hard to do just that and we have also increased the number of small coffee farmers on maui substantially in the fourteen years that we've been working together so i'm now reading as a member of the coffee association board i am a board member i'm testifying this morning to urge you to defer b f seventy the members of the maui coffee association collectively agree that passage of this bill would be disastrous for the future of growing coffee and all other agriculture on maui please defer this bill because it will have so many unintended consequences and you've heard about quite a few of them including the enforcement issues which i can't imagine how you're going to address those and instead seek input from the agriculture community by the ag working group this group has been operation has been meeting for the past three years they have  unearthed and sorted out many of the issues that need to be addressed as you look at the taxation of ag lands farmers and ranchers are the hardest working people you'll ever meet and we have been and are willing to continue giving our time to help you make a solution that will work for both the farmers and the island of maui in raising its tax revenue we want you to be able to have the monies that you need but we certainly  you to lose the farmers that you have been telling us that you want out of one side we keep hearing we want increased food security and out of the other side this would certainly slam a nail in the coffin on that we voted for you to represent us we put our trust in your capable hands but now we are offering our calloused working hands to help guide you in creating fair and enforceable rules for taxing agricultural lands now and into the future please transfer this issue to council member don r a e a r n e committee which is already working with community members of the ag working group together they can outline changes to the tax code that will benefit all seventy i apologize to last sentence to you all a rather exhaustive sort of snapshot of the issue of joe in the states it's something that's intrigued me for a while and so when you have the opportunity and interest i would be happy to continue to speak with you about this so i've taken a look at lonia poco couple the two hundred and looked at them to see what percentage of those lots are actually paying for market value and not asking for your success valuation i know that the chair is committed to passing b f seventy and i would like to give you my commitment that during your term here that we do this we have working group we have the administration has invested with the council in pick tom a tree in q public the real property division that stakeholders and the administration and appropriate members of the budget and finance committee of the council sit down informally as soon as possible i know you're going to budget and really make an effort this term to come up with a an updated view of how we tax with all the things that people have been talking about t work but i agree with many of come before that this the idea of a one size fits all kind of policy really does not present a very good fit for the agricultural activity we have here on maui this idea that some properties are subsidizing others i mean i think you really need to take a realistic look at everything from keep the gulch out at the sixteen mile marker practically to k n i  we have no county services we fix our own roads we can't get fire insurance and separate the highest rates we have no water service we provide our own provide and maintain our own individual water systems  and even some of us it's like most of the roads or even have electricity so to say that is apples and apples and this is a comparison no i mean i think we're probably subsidizing other people just by paying the regular rates right now because they're getting some someone to show up like the gentleman say when the trees fall we go and clear them except on a highway thank god for on a highway so we really need to look at mr watanabe's list of traditional farming areas and expand that and let's expand traditional like by six hundred years of the places that used to feed our places like who and and and  and valley and and and these are these are places that have agricultural value these are traditional farming areas so let's make sure that what we're doing is helping and not hurting subsistence agriculture is the oldest profession and there's nothing to be ashamed of the fact you can help feed your family and help feed others we donate plants from our farms we don't generally sell although we do from time to time when we have quite a surplus but it wouldn't two thousand five hundred dollars a year that's not our focus our focus is to take care of this land and to conserve it's a natural attributes to replant native plants to plant useful fruits and vegetables and that's what many subsistence farmers want to do that they want to share the bounty of the land and there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong that you should be penalize for doing that we want to suggest that the advisory board should be broader and that this committee actually visit some farms and get it get a sense of you know what's going on on some of them  we don't want to build that has unintended consequences like you're reworking pardon me the circuit breaker bill wasn't so good so let's avoid that and all and by saying you know all those people that you're trying to get with the big houses well some of the big houses are because people have to have multiple generations living in one big house leased out our way that is they're not all rich people and the ones that are rich people they have the hundred seventy one i had a vision to get off the grid start a small farm it took me forty years i'm from atlanta georgia it took me forty years to raise the money to do it and i studied the whole planet earth and somehow or other i found i stumbled on the mallory plan because a buddy of mine found this hundred thirteen acre parcel that was the giving up on a highway that there was going south was a very you know forward thinking place on the planet earth where they're really concerned about you know the future of our planet because actually maui is actually a microcosm of a lot of things that are growing on our planet issues with  in the nine hundred thousand dollars loan and saved my financial future and my children and grandchildren my daughter's developing a waldorf school while she's in california we hope to open a waldorf school  to start a local seed company to provide the local farmers thank you for the opportunity to share today regarding b f seventy i'm appreciative of the council member who kama for taking the initiative to address an issue that i believe needs some refining there are fact many land owners across maui that are taking advantage of a tax deduction designed to help farmers when in fact they are not farming and can afford to pay proper property taxes that properly reflect their land use that being said i'm here to ask you to vote no to b f seventy defer it so that it may be revised in a way that appropriately addresses the needs of our community all revision to the current tax system is needed the current b f seventy is not as it penalizes much of the community is intended to support that being said i wish to share a bit of my own story to the council in relation to the way that condominium ization is viewed within the county the proposed to be an agricultural dedication shall automatically be cancelled if it becomes a condominium i came to maui fifteen years ago to farm and began as a laborer earning six dollars an hour after many years farming and building a reputation as a hard worker with high integrity and a lot of motivation i was offered the opportunity to farm on the land that i am currently on and the landowners desired for it to be of use to the community and asked if i had a vision for it i've spent the past four years designing and building my farm on this land which incorporates four acres of pasture two acres of vegetables and nursery four acres of orchard and native tree planting worker such as myself to have the opportunity to own a home in a place where it is increasingly challenging my wife and i built our home on our acre of land in two thousand and thirteen while we were clearly farming and earning way more than the required twenty five hundred dollars we would be penalized  and would have a tax burden that would limit our ability to continue to farm share this with you also to demonstrate how the condominium process offers the opportunity for more of our local community to gain access to land ownership while there was a time that the condo process was abused by land developers and now offers the opportunity for more families to own land and for farmers to live on the land they farm on and have a stake in ownership of this land i suggest you look to the county's agricultural working group for the solutions the small farmers throughout our county and really get this bill more workable that it will help everybody i see that it targets dollars small farmers and the main problem is study their properties they won't be able to make ends meet taxes already got high it's just not workable so please take into consideration and support our small farmers be we want to preserve our eleven thirty five sector that was part of the reason of the meeting is to get public testimony on the proposal as currently written so everyone that testified thank you very much for your thoughts and your recommendations let me just state at the beginning members  base this committee's recommendations moving forward on fifty sixty year old fifty to sixty year old agricultural values and that is what the state has provided us fifty year old buildings who knows if the current value was as of today what would those comparisons be so stating that members i am not one who is going to be some distance fire me as part of this consideration about the egg working group i'm happy to let mr guzmn you know keep working with that but i would ask that within six to eight months i would expect recommendations for us to consider for the next budget session  session if this doesn't go through some of the things that i would tell you now is i will get multiple agricultural rates one that uses dedication that doesn't use dedication to the church is for me that is a big group of taxpayers that we have not heard from him for me that nineteen million dollars is questionable enough to see whether or not you should remain if anything i'll be looking for rewrites or even recommendations from mr guzman's working group is another source of input to the proposed legislation and through the draft what is currently written for discussion purposes and if needed members you can ask what is the current existing law regarding agriculture you for that many testifies ask us to leave the law and to enforce the best meeting we went over this i'm not sure if i'm just going to ask because we had testimony definitions to this i just wanted us to go through it and see the members had a need for the questions on their definitions e mail wasn't presented in this morning's testimony but they were questioning whether livestock by products were covered but it's but it is clearly covered under the and the fourth line  that made it appear that and read the bill thoroughly that i think would be helpful if if the director could get on camera go through some of these definitions just of the people are foliage tree farms and related natural byproduct biomass knots and seeds agricultural use does not include the use of various primary uses yard species setbacks landscaping cultivation of farming of aquatic plants and animals in controlled or selected environments the term dedicated area means those portions of that parcel of real property approved on that is chapter for specific dedicated use by the director department means the director or department of finance definition of family subdivision means a subdivision that has been granted at the for all or subdivision requirements in accordance with section eight hundred two three of the two eight zero homesite means those portions of a parcel exclusive of a portion of the portion in agricultural use and be the portion that is unusable or unsuitable land for agricultural use land use change means for lands dedicated for from their culture district or c final subdivision approval of the dedicated area provided the family some divisions shall not constitute a land change definition of life stock production means the raising of cattle sheep or rabbits or poultry for food or for the production of food maintain as agricultural land means to keep plants dedicated for specific cultural groups in substantial and continuous agriculture use throughout the dedication period unless the owner follows with a directive a land use change cancellation owner a property owner means the fee simple owner of real property provided that the government old real property owner or property owner means a lessee of the land word lease allows a specific agricultural use the goes down next addition we have read the revenue generating means of producing income from the agricultural use or the property and substantial and continuous agriculture use means that dedicated land shall be active continuous and revenue generating agricultural use throughout the period of the dedication the term includes necessary and customary following periods tree farm property or tree farm or entry farm means to classify classified as tree farm property under chapter one eighty six most of the areas i guess the concern i have his determination made by the directors discretion you know i think sometimes i concern myself we have different directors and unless we have what i call department of ag and dedicated inspectors who understand and you heard that from many testifiers i think that's the concerning part of all this if that is the language that can be put in and that we have a dedicated department i think the time has come i have heard this many times i think you've heard the same theme and i think it's time to look at something like that if we're going to incorporate changes i think the farmers the farmers would appreciate that they are rich again and no offense to you while i know you could do a great job unfortunately there is some expertise that is needed to understand what this is all about and i think that's why i have my concern in this verbiage somehow that being cooperative and somehow if we're going to put our money where our mouth is well that's a stablish a department of fagel or some some something of that nature dedicate themselves to making sure people who are doing agricultural production actually do it you know somebody said you see it you know it you feel it you smell it but there are people that go out and say this is not and yet it is so i just believe that's my only concern in this language overall covers most of the concerns that have been brought up by the various individuals today but that's the fires but again the chair i'm concerned and we need something that gives  was proposed to do the advisory committee was talked to as far as potentially being the first people to grant the allowance of the  number two i think the directors discretion is probably more four in favor of the appellate because i think when there is something that may not be very clear that the rector can allow for it and be assured that this process allows any taxpayer to appeal the case that they did not receive yeah and it has a chance to go before the border so there are some i guess still safe measures in sometimes be a real challenge we've seen that with other advisory groups and not to knock any volunteers that come into our community and help us in these areas but i really believe that somehow some means has to be where we have the direct and correct information to that advisory group to the director whomever it may be that we are that's all i'm asking and the rest is fine but i know invite your group who is not knowledgeable or maybe knowledgeable but may have their own take on different issues may be more of a detriment in an asset so that's my concern is that you and i and i still voice the idea that some expertise needs to be brought forward so that we can victory i just wanted to also point out that in regards to the correct information be provided it is an ag use plan provided by the farmer to the director so that the rector is actually just reviewing what the farmer proposes to do on his own proper his or her own property so that's where the expertise comes in because they'll have the opportunity holly everything will work but i understand your concern about extra knowledge is always helpful but just thank you and again i'm not backing off of my concern you know and i will back off on that issue however i'm glad these other and i've read and i see what's in there but again having someone who understands and it that's a hard one to over a calm when you have an economy that's down and a family uses you know let's say most of their land for growing fruits and vegetables for their you know extended families as well and then not having the ability to call themselves a farm and availing of the benefits the tax credits that go along with being  classified as an agricultural use farm so i still trying to figure out how this would be done and it may be something that our p t needs to look at in terms of different classifications like duty commercial large large commercial agriculture another tear for family farms another tier for a sustainable farming these are different aspects that need to be looked at and maybe there should be different classifications in terms of the taxing on the different categories but as one testifier mentioned one size doesn't fit all and we have such a diverse population in the agricultural community in the way that they grow things and the way that they use conventional methods first is natural methods so i think these are issues that issues need to be brought up so that they can be vetted the state does it we've done it several times that if we don't bring these issues up we will always have that problem remaining in our our taxpayer would probably come forward and let us know and would probably that verify the area and probably put in as unusable so as far as valuation would be extremely minimal like a thousand dollars for that area still but we do recognize it  sometimes it could be added value to the property could be you know that much more set back from the next adjoining lot so it really depends what it is but for valuation purposes majority of the time is at a minimal value so for yeah right so i think i wouldn't put that into a dedication unless you really needed that area as a dedicated area good majority of times with me minimal value so why would you dedicate it anyway you could have goats on and maybe thrive on that  situation but you know that really depends but would work with every taxpayer to find and definitely those unsuitable areas that we consider and they consider our nominee anyway you know the other acreage and so for me if you're doing something that's creating a commercial event and you're providing providing more a more measurable thing than if you're just providing for your family for me if we're providing a tax subsidy it should be going to the folks that are are doing something for a but i think subsistence is is of value but then that's measured according to i think your acreage because you know you can subsist necessarily army however there are other people with larger acreage that may be the times are changing and how you define the farmer today so i think we have to take i would like to have more of an opportunity to look into this bill further there there's quite a bit to to have answers because the family or the  d divide it parcels in hama may be considered agricultural but it's not actually the farm but it's carry over from day one when it when it happened so does that mean they have to dedicate it and that's the time come when maybe they like to put it into a family trust instead i think there's more  water rates but that don't make them an expert so they actually come to your place they actually look at what you're growing and they go through your whole plan with you and so again with a very difficult topic which is not unusual for us it seems like we do a lot of this lately and first of all i made notes about things i want to comment on and i want to say that i'm really glad that you know this is being looked at as an initial meeting to try to determine the scope of things that we need to take a look at before we can really make a decision and i really appreciate all the testimony we've got today you know my  if we are going to rely on advice from an advisory group and i agree and i'm happy to hear the farm bureau say today that they think that group has to be more representative verse because that's who we are you know you and i are a long time coming i know people but we've seen how things have changed and our communities change our makeup of our people our demographics is very change our lifestyle everything's changed so we kind of have to be  opening the doors a little bit more even though it's difficult for us a couple of things that i noticed in the bill is it is kind of cute i know the egg working group has struggled and struggled to define egg they were able to get really good meat and they grew very well there are so you know maybe we don't want to be too exact about what qualifies the other thing is the concern about subsistence eg you know i've been trying to resist that for a long time and want to say well you know hopefully you're going to produce a lot of stuff but this is again an area that is changing and we ourselves are talking about sustainability and food security and all those kinds of things you  weekend if you go to a farmer's market it's really impressive you know i watched the farmer's market grow up into kalani and they were they hit over one hundred farmers to the point where they had to limit how many people could come because a parking lot and parking and control of the whole thing got so big but it's mind boggling how this is growing and growing and the products that are available today are they are contributing and they are making a difference so i agree with my colleagues we need to take a real close look at it and i'm going to have to get over the idea that you know a big farm is a big farm but there's a little farm to make a difference i'm like you i grew up with the farm in the backyard and for us we never thought of that because we thought of that stuff to feed ourselves and share with our friends in our neighbors and it's a different world the other thing is i want to say that you know while i don't really i'm not all that uncomfortable with thing this is the term and by the director i do want to make sure that our director has a has a background some kind of background i'm sorry but i think when you and you know if i went through this in my early years here at the council i got involved in a case where somebody wanted water and the department denied them and so i made it a point to go up there and look at that myself and i came back and i said you know what you go fight this because you have a farm i know if i'm when i see them i know how it smells i know how it looks and i know when i see the equipment and you know all that stuff a farmer and really all it takes is somebody who knows that to go take a look and of course the man won its case and he did get the water so you know when you if you know it when you see it you know it i think the inspector parts are i really important you know it's been brought up over and over and over we need to spector's you know and that is a lot of this also if we find a few few people a big fine probably the rest would go away sometimes it just takes you know to get somebody and make a big deal out of inevitable my god i better watch out i can't be cheating but sometimes that's what it takes otherwise everybody looks the other when nothing happens you know there was brought up earlier about well we're subsidizing and you know we're charging more to the guy that lives in the city than the guy that lives up country well i'm really sorry but again i want to support the people like myself waiting for water meters you know what is my land worse we don't know what i mean or if we ever thought about that i just paid my taxes and i don't think i had a break in that because i can't get a letter meter so i think we need a big picture server and i want to thank you for starting the discussion and leaving it open so that everybody can you know come to offer their suggestions i think that's a fair way thank you thank you  members we've reached a point of the intent is to take a lunch break i'm going to ask for you to return for a shorter afternoon session i just want to go through the remaining sections of the proposal and i get your comments your questions so that we can start work see how we want to pursue this moving forward i will tell your friend i will be looking to the a working group to continue their efforts to coming provide us with some recommendations in the near future so that we can make some adjustments because we are going to go into budget and we are going to set a great it's an annual task of you know part of it is my test was trying to see if we could have a better basis  meeting in march ninth two thousand and fifteen we are going through the proposal under the heading of b f seventy  mister thank you chair the intent of this is just to clarify like you mentioned what's currently going on and add in some language so we feel it's easier to understand  first page it states livestock production of says livestock production and production of livestock by products but then when we define livestock production it doesn't include shall submit the following one agriculture use plan the form for which shall be provided by the director to it declaration signed by the owner seeing that if the petition is approved by the directed dedicate area shall be used only for the specific our goals you set forth in the petition for the duration of the dedication period the submission of the petition five evidence that the proposed dedicated area is currently in agriculture use and specify in the petition six evidence that the dedicated area where produce farm income p coach use is greater than or equal to five thousand dollars per acre during that period as evidence by transcript of the appropriate federal tax returns number eight any other information required by the direct jury would you like to stop there and  mr white the petition for the duration of the dedication i think would be helpful for the director to kind of outline what that means because i think from listening to some of the testimony there was a concern that if you changed from terrorist that whatever specified in the u s plan is followed if someone submits a use plan that is ultra specific there is a process built in to change agricultural use which requires a doctor's approval where as if i believe that it's envisioned that it would be a little more broad like the personal use the dedicated area for i believe truck crops was mentioned once and that it's a broader term obviously still  but a broader term as opposed to just saying i'm going to grow tomatoes here you know and then if you want to switch to something from tomatoes to let's say pineapples then you may need to or you probably will need to go in for a change of  i assume that we can take care of that with the dedication for miss currently we have four categories that we use it's diversified sugar pineapple and pasture so within diversified you don't have to tell us if you switch from tomatoes to carrots but if you're switching from pasture to diversify you should notify our office so that when we are inspecting the property we know what we're looking at s ok well you know because i have a concern with that one because you know it says in the prior five years preceding the data finding of this petition and at the annual gross income derived from the my question is is that something that stranded by each or a statue by the state or is there another rationale for five thousand per acre going to that period when we already said you know twenty five hundred in number four and when you go to number eight i mean twenty five hundred keeps popping up all over the place we have five thousand so i wanted to question what rationale was used and what the meaning of that because again these are some of acre i mean that's got to be pretty good farming to make twenty five hundred dollars per acre now i guess if you do enough farming yes you might do it but i guess that you're just a question i have on that particular  we did talk about this thing about being able to switch problems and i think what we walked away from understanding was that you could switch but you needed to that i mean you know what was going on so that they knew so that was better if we put the four categories of mr martin mentioned in the language that is exactly what mr muttering over here based upon the productivity ratings of the proposed dedicated area in those uses for which it is best suited a study of the lens ownership the revenue generating keep ability and other criteria as may be appropriate by the directors discretion the director should also make a ver or land court and shall submit to the director a copy of the recorded document within thirty days of record ation thank you  questions you may have in this area at this thing these type of determinations so we felt coming this morning that we need to look outside of brewer and other types of organizations that may be able to provide us experience and knowledge and so we'll be asking the community   departments responsibilities so i'm sure that france or it has a knowledge of some sense of financing bond being debt service but maybe not necessary agricultural specific agricultural i mean no resort development properties or conservation lands so in a for me this is something that we've been listening to testimony and this is a proposal that we feel could dedicated area is reasonably well suited for their proposed agricultural use to come back to just a director or the advisory committee or the actual land owner one of the things that the visor group does is they look at the petition and see if it makes sense i think their recommendation goes to the director for ultimate action it is not the advisory committee to make that action is the director's job so i think that's why it's in there it's probably the director or his as it could be myself already office to make the final determination back to the taxpayer mr i think i believe the intent of putting this type of language in here is so that when one is doing the agricultural plan you have an idea of what the director is looking for and got that will be on a form as provided by the director but by putting these types of things in it puts everyone on notice and director also as to what he or she should be looking at when making this determination so just for guidance and of course policy so if th i guess it's all relative big and so i don't believe it's it's not significant i don't believe so ok well that's something maybe we can fly note and let people know thank you and even twenty nine dollars it sounds as though we're not getting the agricultural advisory committee members involved at this stage necessarily my understanding was that there would be involved if there was a dispute or last talked i believe chairman you were there and they had it seemed like there was willing to be at the initial phase of the project so i think that is up for discussion and to see whether or not they should review every single one from the get go or just as needed is my sense is that you've got a lot of lot of applicants that are going to be applicants you've seen over and over and over and you're very familiar with them and i wouldn't want to get the ag review committee involved in those that have been dedicated before those that have been in the agricultural use that there is no real question that they're farmers and  that's that might if we got them involved in all the you know each of the cases in my bog down the system unnecessarily a dedication advisory committee as well as record nation time one of the people in the audience that has gone through this said it took them between five and six months just to get it  so i think we better look at time frames in this whole thing because we don't want people sitting around and trying to get a yes or no meanwhile you know seasoned going thank you thank you for that co any questions in this section members lot you know in conversations i have with people they say well how many years should you give them a break so it is an issue and i do think we need to do deal with it you know how long are we willing to extend the benefits is it two years five years ten years twenty years depending on what you're doing that makes a big difference yes yes we've we understand that and i think that want to years we obviously would like to see the plan as far as what is their expectation of how long it would be and that the dedication should at least be as long as what that period would be obviously you wouldn't want to five y you know for those of us that have been around this a lot of times of what we need to we communication we only have one way communication and i think maybe it might be beneficial to have more communication like department in the meter for eg lots i think that is very good for us because a lot of times we already discount properties that may not have a water meter but at the same time when we do get a  meter i don't think anybody's calling us letting us know that they received a meter to move your system is accordingly so if we could get an annual maybe list from the water department as far as who maybe up to the water meter during the year that may be beneficial to that and it would go to standing and it would go to what at one time and that would you know give spread the communication and really really help the people that have to fill out this paper ninety eight percent discount from its fair market german i just just a quick note i think these numbers did not just come out anywhere believe they have been multiple groups so to speak i started in one in two thousand and recommending any one or the other so it's really for his body to the site whether the percentages should be changed or not so this is by far not not a recommendation is just a number to start for discussion chairman thank you for that i know that comprehensive change you know let's use that word comprehensive change and give them some benefit for their work through the years i know you see five years prior because you're changing classifications and  fear taxation program for agriculture but also fair to the rest of the tax base where without seeing a proposal i would see it would be open to  come up with a fair county white policies is a big challenge to all of us as always all the tame by the way you members you know the key is to try and ensure agricultural lands for the i understand it's a difficult thing to pan out and what you truly want to do it your land so when your dedication is don't work for me you'll be up front some and so you can farm but then your plan is to develop and wait for the good times that's one thing that everybody wants the high value high equity when you want to sell members besides the valuation who also have control of rates to make the final tax bill so that you know our minds as we go through the various ways of ad occupied by the land owner is that's considered and so how are the other dwellings on the property assess  home site is defined as the portions of the parcel exclusive of the portion in agriculture use so it's basically all land that's not land that's not being farm so it would include land under the home that the one occupies and land under additional structures or it could be just a vacant land not used for  that was really not for farm it's really for future homes like our recommendation is to always carve it out so that when you do put that holds in that those areas are not affected by robot what this is hoping to address the disparity in tax assessment so i'm just it doesn't tell me who this came from but is it showing me that most parcels in these usually perceived all market so chair sorry if i'm not addressing this particular part of the ordinance but it was sticking in the forefront of my mind in regards to what these handouts are meant not at this time i just it's my understanding that the percentage is five years and fifty percent and ten years eighty percent twenty years nineteen that's all policy decision where there's not a set formula that that the five years at fifty in the and so forth actually came out of the last week and just to put some perspective on it the five and ten year dedications i believe we felt were going to be those that developers would choose and that the people in the farming community would choose the twenty and they would choose the twenty because as mr  tria pointed out later and we've we've dealt with what happens when you pass away what we haven't dealt with is the issue that mr victory you know brought up of someone agene farmer that's a much harder thing to deal with but i'm sure it will come up with something there but i just wonder relay that it's it came out of our take it was basically  more aimed at having developers choose whether you know have to dedicate if they're not going to move ahead with development and we don't want a situation where  as happens currently where we've got a lot of of developers who are just but if you cows on the land and they may be choosing to develop in five years in ten years or more or less so this  gives us the an option for them to select and i guess is the answer market  that's really it so it rates or be something in your so i'd be ag the whole f home site this part here based on highest and best use of comparable values of similar lands be put to similar uses for it for example most in most parts parcels on agricultural land if you're a homeowner you're a homeowner the attacks and the rate is could be residential depending on what the use of the home site area is but yeah if it's ag land but it's not dedicated it's being used drag would probably be ag so it's a bunch of things would be looked at for classification but most likely if it's the traditional situation that you're thinking about where it's their house on ag land the rest of property is dedicated and they live in their house and they qualify for the homeowner exemption you know probably be a homeowner with the homeowner exemption for their home state deemed to have forfeited any right to land use change as defined by this chapter for the period of the any questions of this into three forty eight zero zero five this is a reminder it's has a specific meaning thank you letter h change of agriculture use if the owner or the owners permit he or less license  but the owner is written authorization actually change from one specific are called use to another i use the party deciding the change may request that the director authorize the substitution of agriculture uses the question to be made in writing and shall be provided for provided in deciding whether to grant the request director shall follow the process for in section b in the event that the request is granted by the director the conversion to the quote you shall be completed within thirty six months of the approval of the request by the director and the dedicated area should be utilized for the substitute cultural use for the remainder of the dedication period upon approval by the director of the approval shall be appropriated recorded but the recorded copy transmitted to the director within thirty days of the record ation might be fine thank you mr victory and any questions put in your mind at this time no not at this time thank you thank you misplace no nothing specific at this not on their land in their area kind of thing and that they should be their purview to decide this crops not work you know we're going to change it into something else is more feasible doing is so they're in full compliance and there's no issues with dedication or taxation ok so as long as the practitioner is in an honest very transparent as to what's being produced or not on a maybe one agricultural category and sort of use because i think i agree with them all the testifiers saying what the hell do you know better than i that i'm changing from onions to tomatoes and i don't want you coming in tell me telling me i can but if i'm changing from cattle to sheep i'm still in past maybe i'm getting a little far off the reservation with les mis if he has some comment to share thank you chairman obviously we would be for and i'm fine with striking specific and just talk about category v fine with us if this body still chooses to strike number two i would not have a problem with that i don't we're not trying to create more work for ourselves believe me you know and i don't need you to tell me that you change you from tomato tomato or whatever it is you know but i think all we're trying to do the versified ag to pasture that's kind of drastic but you know i think that would be the instance that we're trying to do we're not trying to be nit picky here but we're just trying to make sure that we have the best information that we have so that when we feel a visit we understand what we're dedication five and ten years shall be automatically terminate upon expiration of the dedication a let's read you renewed sept fourth in section any questions concerns on this  you my understanding that once expiration of the specific term of years it will automatically the dedication period will automatically not be renewed original dedication would have expired the owner may be subject to the retroactive up with tax and penalty on the terms of the original dedication to mr goodman try thank you the reason why we didn't want to allow the retroactive application of the greater discount is already collected that money so we'd be it this is like if you're in your let's say your nine of you ten your dedication and you decide you know what i want to go twenty years so moving forward they want to go to twenty or so they'd be eligible for the ninety eight percent we're not going to go back two years one through nine and mean what the heat and what i guess would have paid if they're in a twenty year dedication that's the point of that language it's already money that the county has collected so it wasn't going to be like after the fact refund and the idea behind it also was that if you if you were to do that in your in year nine of your tenure designation you could really do to ten year dedication because i'm good with that you know i like the idea you know if someone doesn't abuse the system again that's what we're trying to avoid thank you rhys right to inspect the director of directors authorized repair representative shall have the right to conduct inspections of the dedicated area and the surrounding land at reasonable hours during the dedication period the owner shall ensure documents requested by the director or directors authorized representative are provided within ten business days of the request this period may be extended by the director members christians in this area  cochran sure heard many times over in testimony earlier in regards to getting knowledgeable inspectors or i guess your having authorized representative  testifiers today so just want to put it past the party chime in and give confidence to the viewers in public that you have qualified knowledgeable people i guess farming to go into the inspection because you'll be able to look at the ag plan and by reading it be able to tell that there's you know substantial compliance with what's going on and there's the opportunity for discussion with the owner of the property or you know whoever's operating but and and of course knowledge will be helpful but i believe the degree of knowledge it's you know doesn't have to be think i don't think they have any and i think the big i mean may or may not have one but quite county i know for sure went out for a new culture inspector it was just body probably in two thousand and six that what do they want it if they want the appraisers the existing appraisers to do it do they want to have a specialized class and of a agriculture inspector to do it and then that can be done it's it's we'll take it up on the guidance of the chairman of this point so that then i'm open to it but making the egg sector pay for it that with the land there are the whoever submitted their plan so you can confirm i'm guessing that that's the best case scenario i mean a lot of times in the initial years if this does pass ford is remember the appraiser going to have a lot of inspections to do to get everybody to be at their farm at the time of may not be as practical that would be a perfect plan but majority of the time if we have access to it and there's the plan i don't see it being very difficult but in the event that maybe it's hard to identify the boundaries or maybe to preserve is just not familiar with the area i mean that's when you would probably have to contact the owner to set up the inspection especially if there is some disagreement as to what what is being done and what is being planned so i think for the most part majority of the time i think it should be no problem but i think in the instances where technology that that is one area that we would probably prefer to do it if if the recent images are are available for especially a large parcel that it can be done that would be ideal i think probably the quickest way  dedication i mean the the farm itself as being used as an agricultural purpose or are they just inspecting it just the documents because it says the owner shall ensure that any documents request it so is it just basically inspection that the director goes on the property and the owner just has his signet documents to verify it or is it oh yeah i think for most part i think everything that you submit in a normal dedication which is a dedication for a plot plan and some full recent photos should be able from what majority of the time if we can use  probably be ended at that level to do a site inspection is probably for applications lack of maybe pictures or lack of a planned detailed plan i think that's so the time that the inspection would majority take place so for the most part most most farms if we have a recent imagery can be done and be done at that level without inspection but i think inspection gives you the opportunity to verify some some shady areas or just not not eighty and we use the imagery and it kind of looks like half of it or maybe double it in a state inspection is needed to verify or validate the area that we're discounting for you you know that's probably the time that we doing the same destruction to val area ok so i i would my only concern now would be just the language that would limit the scope of the inspection so if you're going to and spec to verify what is in the documents then that's that's all that should expected because you wouldn't want to be going there and inspecting and that all the owner scott permitting problems with the building and inspecting buildings and you know or if that's what you want to do then maybe that needs to be better fight in the language that that's what you guys want to do go on a full on site inspection to look at everything i would like to have  right now that's hard to say the new applications we get years we get a plot plan will go out we'll look at it so i don't think we get very many appeals  informal appeals that the board of review for agriculture use we might get a few a year but it's not a large number we do inspect properties when they when they file an appeal when they get a permit and at that time we'll see if they're doing the farming that they said they were doing and communication with their owners you know i wanted to know that because you know we're so concerned about making sure  this correctly i wondered if it's a real problem that you know there's a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of checking or is this just something that happens once in a while i would have to say it's once in a while because if somebody didn't receive their agriculture benefit i probably would have about the inspection you know if you're going to cover three departments then you could very well look forward to having a tri fold inspection and i think this came up when we started doing the b and b s that somebody would go to see if there was enough parking space and in the meantime would say hey there's a stink where it's not supposed to be or the toilet is leaking or whatever and it became a nightmare so i think we better you know really carefully  dedication shall automatically counsel ponder over domination by the director that any of the following has occurred one dedicated area has not been utilized in accordance with the culture plan or is not insubstantial and continuous use for a period of twelve consecutive ones this provision shall not apply to the dedicated area converted to a subset of cultural use to any land use change as defined by the chapter three a land that has been condominium or part of a property regime under section five fourteen eighty five fourteen portion of dedicated area improbable or impossibilities seven failure of the dedicated area to produce gross farm income created in or equal to twenty five hundred dollars of evidence by the transcript of the federal tax return  chairman we can do that i think the procedure would be that if a condominium was created we would request that if it's ok to have the lien f not obstruct the still the use of that was dedicated however it needs to be revised and i knew submission on there that it would be created if not it's on the most a partial  because you've taken it from one of the comments from them that laid out a hard time i have our time with that word also so that you know that the other three who are continuous or whatever number it they're not penalize in any way shape or form i guess that's what best example would be if you had a dedicated area and you paving over it would be interesting but i'm sure someone with an interesting reason why people over could also be farming but let's say you build a house to live in right in the middle of your field that's going to prohibit farming in that area you know that's using that as a house so that would be an overt act that would make farming in that area improbable or impossible so that would what is the community benefit or to feed other i mean not like you know so many ways share they're saying that twenty five hundred is the steep figure and that's not what they don't make that kind of money that was i'm just trying to toss that out on the table for discussion because there are a few testimonies that we'd relation to the minimum range greatly across the country some places fifty thousand i mean it depends away in the country and what type of coach is going on in those various areas a minimum gross income varies greatly between that and depending on where you are in the country doing  if the we were talking about land becoming a condominium disqualifying it our existing condominiums able to dedicate a satiric yes there are and then the  other point i had was i believe the understanding is that it's twenty five hundred dollars per t m k correct so i think as we have outlined it is twenty five hundred per team  currently the plantations a lot of them have one dedication that covers multiple parcels for example probably files one tax return but still have multiple parcels to me if you were a rancher and you had five parcels you'll have dedications recorded on your five parcels but you're really going to have one i'd taken a look at their situation over the weekend and they've got some small parcels and you know that are lava and so hard to say that that piece of love generated twenty five hundred dollars of income so i agree with the way the department is dealing with it thank you thank you dedication all differences between the amount of taxes they were paid and the and those that would have been do without the discount from the dedication as provided for in section b shall be payable along with a ten percent penalty ten percent per year penalty from the retroactive date that these payments would have been due to additional taxes and penalties due and owing as a result of the cancellation shall be paramount lean upon the property as provided for by this chapter  suffered by the owner in those situations where the owner is the individual actively engaged in the agricultural use of the dedicated area three the taking of the dedicate area or the portion thereof of a government entity provided for these instances that where only a whatever meaning dedicated area job jeff and that such as wind storm flood disease or infestation that destroys a crop or live stock on the dedicated area and number five the twenty year dedication and that for any such reason like death because he is the sole proprietor i mean somebody could always take on the twenty year dedication but this is the that if that person not only dies but got seriously injured would that include inability due to age i would say that that would take it be if you can no longer farm and we're going to have to take that word if that's what they can't do i'm not going to argue with your an illegal practice on our behalf of taking or because it's a taking and now we're saying if we take then that's one anyways i don't know that we're taking this kind of trouble some so how i just get a little more clarification on that paragraph as the times when we it's ok for us to take it and it's not any legal practice or in someone's eyes to come back at us in litigation mode  i think it's taking just refers to us getting the land we don't usually take well we are eminent domain is an example of a legal taking so this is basically saying if a portion of your property gets taken through the eminent domain process but we use the word taking because if we wanted to be broad and not just limited to eminent domain there might be some other way yeah government can achieve this be government taking and i'm not sure if we took the fear we took an easement of the area but you can't farm there anymore so if that me the rest of it infeasible to farm yes there would be no application of the misplaced yes thank you to your own heart back to this thing about aging i fortunately had a lot of opportunity this weekend to meet with a country folks because i was involved in two family events and you know everybody wants to ask me about these things so it's important and some of the things they were talking about was you know not necessarily being not able to farm because of illness or because of some accident or whatever but you know they're getting old and they've been farming some of these people include love from when the world began i mean you know cool has been farming and the same families over and over and over and over and they've reached the point now where they're in their eighty's late eighty's and they just can't farm me more they want to retire but their children are not excited about being farmers because they became teachers and other things is your way to earn a living but yet they're worried about this dedication and they want to make sure that should they give it up you know they're not going to run into this text to ation and one of the ideas that they mention and i don't know if we can work this out because you know we can make real complicated formulas around here and nobody can figure out what we're doing but anyway they were seeing if i land has been in farming and we've been farming and we have the records to show for the last fifty years can we get some kind of a brownie point for that even if we can't continue doing you know we've been feeding my way for all these years we've been farmers we stuff it with all of this and now we cannot do something with us but you know i'm hearing that we're talking about some kind of an accommodation for age and it's not because they're sick but they're just i don't know how you define sick aging does cause problems so back and sore legs and i can't get on the tractor i can't even see to drive like i used to before but i think it's really not a good thing to say at this point is that magic age you know i'm going to be seventy five this year does that mean that i can't do anything you know what i mean so we had just a fire this morning seventy five they're still doing all kinds of things so it's really a tough one but we're here to make the financial decision for the betterment of the whole company so i would say that we have unique challenges with the egg component keep in mind the residential component commercial component resort component open space conservation component every tech space would like the same each consideration i'm very sure  really just like the circuit breaker we don't we don't eliminate the young person from circuit because you don't know the situation that somebody is in so i think we thought that a single exemption and that the circuit breaker apply to everyone was fit the needs that anybody who who had a hardship would be able to take advantage of thank you very much because our young families are suffering thank you to you again and anything else and and members  go back and pay ten never you would originally have paid itself dedication plus ten percent more per year so you have to go back t years you did do but now you're not going to finish out your last five so you're going to have to go back and pay back taxes on the fifteen years but you were really truly farmer ranching to the next generation they don't choose to live you know carry on but then others like mr born are in hanukkah he has family is already he's you know getting them on the farm already it young age and they already you know take it over but say as they hit teenage years and he's got of interest in life i don't want to do this anymore but here he puts that out for that twenty year dedication those things happen in life you know i feel like it's i don't know i understand and hopefully these people can find alternative means to live out the dedication but for your natural disasters obviously airplane crashed into a field god forbid or you know i don't know just some type of thing that's not listed here occurs and now you truly cannot anymore you and then a loss of out of adequate water that can be no fault of that person's that could be perhaps i don't know the water well now somehow judged or contaminated water and it's not been feeding the crops that were once right i mean just maybe i'm going off tangent but i mean i think these are definitely possible that could occur not going to happen every day but who knows they're just not written here in black and way so i'd be really unfortunate for someone to come across some odd german we have given authorization to the director of finance to step in and make that determination and should he not always have the appeal process you know the advisory committee to bounce back those things question that i have is i know that at the end of the result of this you would have to pay the difference the difference of the discount plus says it shall be and then i guess the person would have to be required to pay it along with a ten percent per year penalty from the person respected gates from these payments what have been do can that be explained on the it's it's a little bit of bag on ten percent of the entire amount due or ten percent that has already been paid that the outstanding do  if for example if you don't pay your homeowner you know just your regular homeowner rate and everything in your delinquent it's ten ten ten percent of what is outstanding correct ok and then the last sentence or the additional edition of taxes and penalties due and owing as a result of the cancellation shall be a paramount lean upon the property how do you get a pair money how do you get priority if it's not it's not via the like a i think that we have to be very clear on what this ten percent applies to mr because description it's ten percent of the amount at the end of the occasion but use which you know could be like a minimum tax and then the taxes what it would have been without the agriculture use and then you take the difference of those t and then the penalty is applied to that per year so currently if you're if you roll back on a dedication in your one year is if you're in the middle it was a ten year dedication and you were in the fifth year and you've got to roll back the five years and be fifty percent for a year to be forty percent three years thirty percent and the one that was doing one year would be ten percent penalty on the amount not paid currently is ten percent per year where the agriculture use the word right now is ten percent so they get just ten percent on each but dedicated land should be assessed at one hundred percent of the market value at the end of the number two at the end of the grace period the only show use a dedicated line is substantial and continuous agriculture use for the entire remaining period of the dedication  not be counted in determining the owner's compliance with the dedication three no grace period shall be granted for partial within five years of the expiration of the period grace  if i may thank you all yeah this almost caught a complicated it just allows for if something strange happens it will be an automatic cancellation they'll be a lot of break break and there's three i believe it's three ways it can happen one i would understand if it's in foreclosure two if at least a license or permit goes sideways and the person is not there to farm it anymore so the owners can't stop trying to figure it out and the owner's not the farmer or three gotta remember that earlier it's a consolation as happens upon failure to pay the taxes so even though we're talking like a big discount there still are taxes due if they fail to pay those taxes it won't be an automatic cancellation if they get the grace period however it has to be with the understanding that during the grace period you won't get the break any more this is all based on a fifty percent reduction eighty percent reduction or ninety percent reduction so why are you getting all that squared away you will be pain free market tax on your fair market reduction after the grace periods over need to start farming again and you can do it within five years if you do a grease period in your two you can do those three reasons and regards to what this is cochrane brought up for the natural disaster of the vandalism on the person may elect not to cancel their dedication at that point so if anything we could work in some language here not in the grace period but under consolation because you know it's it's a twelve month period twelve consecutive months of non continuous is a victory and thank you and thank you much for creation so let me give you this example just because i know you is waiting for this so i i wanted to make sure i prepped you today so i wanted you to be ready for this question if somebody has a twenty year dedication right and you you you have just stated about this movement so let's say for closure for closure happen gene year seven ok for some reason it happens right and know i'm just trying to make sure that if you especially a twenty year lease would be the one that i would have the most concern with the variables that could occur during that twenty year period there's no limitation on how many times you can none of us know about however you know i just want to make sure that the public understands that there is opportunities for more than one time but it's five years i mean i'm not one hundred percent sure what the intention behind this language was but in a lot of this a build buildings to prevent abuse because with the grace period you could you kept getting a grace period you could do your whole twenty years in a each nominee must be approved by the council in their order to serve as a member member shall have staggered terms of five years to committee shall be advisory and should make recommendations to the director on matters pertaining to agricultural dedications the committee ma i think one of the things and i like this wording but one of the things that are in fact i think couple of fires mentioned is the fact that maybe every district should have representation i mean we do this and permission put in there with these nine members and again the other point i don't know if i will always agree that the farm bureau should be the one submitting the names that's maybe another issue i would like other groups to be able to  names like the farmers union and others what i really should because every district pretty much has some part of farming in there maybe more prevalent in some areas versus others but i really think the district should have some kind of rep y three member committee make up at this point in time was in my mind was the sooner you can bring this committee together to make business decisions on behalf  practitioner i just go by my experience you guys deal with the same sunshine law requirements can an ag applicant wait four to six weeks for an advisory committee to make a recommendation to a director who may take something smaller more workable that can meet sooner ereka mandation to the director for a final decision so the practitioner can move on one way or the other he has an and answer i'm not dismissing that there's merit to a nine member nine district participation i just don't know if i people want to wait that long for a decision is my point so i just bring that up as it was what was going through my having two boards at this time to advisory committees in the event that it is overwhelming for that one one group so this is an idea that you can choose to create the second but you don't have to thank you for and i like the idea i now understand your condensing it to just three maybe five to spread out a little more representation across the islands i mean your island doesn't have a whole lot of ag going on representation but again i would leave it up to the various groups to chime in to see what they feel would be a nice representation overall for this county i like the idea of an advisory committee th thinking three four five six months in advance because of problems but for me more importantly than the district representation which i love the idea but i understand you know how hard it is to make that work i'm concerned more about qualifications you know like some of the boards and commissions we require but we have to have engineers and we have to have a cultural specialist or i think i'm more worried about the qualifications that the people would have to sit on this thing to make sure that they do understand egg on to make sure they have some understanding of the egg business and how it works and i think that that's where i would like us to put our emphasis is on qualifications as to  we invested in other other means to collect more taxes is why this is another means to make sure we get the right judgment call right from the beginning have that referee on site instead of somebody looking in a pan and thinking well maybe maybe not  and i will not go away from that i will continue to push some kind of expertise in that area somewhere and someone who can give us that within your department or someone as an egg expert who can advise all the departments what it's water major agriculture would have some kind of representation because they would know their district and what's going on around them so beyond that that's thank you appreciate what you brought forward and the effort you brought t my comments but i do appreciate your chair in terms of bringing back the some of the as a legislator i believe it's probably one of the most hardest jobs that you can have and sometimes that you know as part of our job is to raise the issues and this is a big issue and it's been an issue for quite some time for many many years and it's not something that we can just sweep under the table but  occasionally we have to address these issues in they have to come up and this is a good forum this is the good time that we can all work together working with the community working with the administration and working together as colleagues on an effort lessees and i just want to be sure that it's clear that lessees of have i guess long term leases like with homeowners lessees will be able to apply for the dedication regular land this was looking at the owners applying because ultimately it's going to be the owners who are on the hook for the real property taxes not the not the  understand that but under the homeowners of the home owner has leased his property for ten years or more and it's the less that can come in and claim for the homeowners exemption but i know we've got a lot of least lands and i just want to white with the staff and one of the areas that we potentially have issues is with the state if you have a state agricultural lease and something goes wrong  historic federalism practice is that government does or texaco government doesn't tax government but they may change with the current attitude and the district final subdivision approval there are subdivisions that are large lot that don't create any new develop of land or subdivisions that are for road widening plots and so things of that sort so those back in one nine hundred ninety five so twenty years later we still haven't fixed it and you know i'm i'm one of those that benefits from the triple benefit of the egg  estates and our people truly doing ag on these ag lots and getting and so that was my initial increase in regards to this handle and as i understand mr hughes starr had presented this because it doesn't show who it was submitted basically breaks on all the parcels in lonia poco and a couple of which sure which subdivision a couple of it and it but if this is correct then there are seven ag ag dedicated parcels i suppose it looks like it and one hundred forty five market value so looks like we're getting a good chunk of our proper real property tax out of these areas so i don't know if it falls into the haiku area that  we're rich to figure out now but i mean if this is correct i'm quite pleased and surprised to see that most people are paired it looks like to me paying their fair share in real property taxes i ca the testifiers i got tons and tons of e mail testimony over the weekend which i tried to reply to each one i was really busy my father had to work out but it was really great to this into everybody today and i like the spirit of let's try and make this work that i'm feeling here today and we know that you know it's a matter that we have to deal with and let's just go forward looking with everybody to try to see what we can come up with that works for all of us grossman in the working group to have their opportunity to see if they can come up with some additional recommendations for consideration but i would tell you the members i'm not going to let go of this we are going to move forward and continue to improve our education system a structure as well as making sure that it ties in to zoning categories and permitted uses so