Court Opinion

ID: 9633482
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 11:49:04.950273+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:36.355235
License: Public Domain

ZIMMERMAN, Justice
(concurring and dissenting):
I join Justice Howe’s opinion, except that portion apparently holding that the State Tax Commission did not properly determine that all of the land in question was “devoted to” agricultural purposes. First, the Commission considered the facts and determined that the land was eligible for the exemption, including the parts of the parcels that were too steep and gullied for the cattle to graze upon. Justice Howe’s opinion reverses this essentially factual determination without explaining, other than in the most general way, how the record evidence fails to support the Commission’s conclusion.
Second, even if the legal standard applied by the Commission to determine whether land is “devoted to” agricultural purposes was incorrect, as Justice Howe’s opinion suggests, the court today has not explained to the Commission or to the bar what the proper standard is. Some language in the opinion can be read to suggest that the exemption is to be denied only with respect to those tracts of which no part is physically used for agricultural purposes. However, other language suggests that the exemption is not available for any portion of a parcel “not in actual agricultural use.”
If the former standard is the appropriate test, then I assume the Commission can administer the law without much difficulty (assuming that we explain to them in some greater detail how to determine, as the majority has apparently done in this case, when land is “devoted to” raising livestock and how to determine whether “nonproductive areas [are] reasonably required for the purpose of maintaining the land actually devoted to production”). But if the Commission must deduct from every parcel of *781land otherwise eligible for the exemption the acreage that is not either devoted to agriculture or a nonproductive area reasonably required for the maintaining of land so devoted, then we have created precisely the “staggering undertaking” for the assessor warned against by the New Jersey court in Township of Andover v. Kymer, 140 N.J.Super. 399, 404-05, 356 A.2d 418, 420 (1976). It is no answer to say blithely that the statute “need not be applied as the law of the Medes and the Persians.” That will hardly be helpful guidance to the Commission. The Commission must apply the law as we construe it. By our construction, we act as the Medes and the Persians, and we have created an absurdly unadmin-isterable law.
DURHAM, J., concurs with the concurring and dissenting opinion of ZIMMERMAN, J.