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OT MN Geen acres question

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Dave from MN

Well-known Member
A fellow I rent from has aabout 50 acres of pasture that we are working on getting fenced, but the weather is not cooperating and it does not look like we will finish until 2012 some time, if the watr goes down. The land is contigios with the tillable I rent. He has to sign up for rural preserve if we cant get cattle on there by may 1st 2012, for the green acres. HIS county assesor(sherburne) is saying if he enrolls it in rural preserve, he can do NOTHING with it, no grazing, no wood cutting, nothing. Benton, Mille lacs, stearns, and morrison, all say that if in rural preserve, you can do what you want with it, but cant put houses on it. You can graze, or what ever. Is any one else running into this issue or does this assesor just have a hard one for this land owner. The owner is so stressed out from this as he cant get a straight answer out of any representative on where the law specifies the cant's and can's. Any info ro help would be appreciated.
 
Would it help if you got written interpretations of the law from each of the other counties, and presented that to the Sherburne board? They need to jack up THEIR assessor if he"s not consistent with the rest of the State. No sense wasting time with the assessor.
 
I don't understand what the assessorr has to do with it. I would think it would be either the extension agent who would know or for sure the county attorney.
 
Not familiar with your law, but usually those statutes are a matter of state law, and are not open to interpretation by county officials. You need to find the state statute (and accompanying administrative code) that establishes the rules. Might be worth paying for an office conference with an attorney who is familiar with those issues.
 
The assessor sends out the RE tax statements, and the tax is dependent on the classification of the land. Green Acres is a MN plan to tax farm land according to usage, not developmental possibilities. Extension agent (USDA) has nothing to say about land classification.
 
Dave, this is similar to Va's land use taxation, where my land is taxed as a tree farm (a small proportion of what it would be at fair market value taxation). The program's run by the individual county assessors in the counties that have opted in to the state-wide program. The rules for the program vary considerably county by county, as do all forms of zoning.

In fact, my previous county board of supervisors brought in a new assessor in an effort to reduce the amount of land use taxation here. Major money at stake. $90,000,000 more per year here would be collected if they dropped the program. But not from me, we'd have to develop, sell out, and leave.

Where counties are too sparsely populated to have a dedicated assessor, I don't know who runs the program. It doesn't exist in all counties, depends on the individual boards of supervisors.
 
Is there not a published set of rules? Studying them is the only defense a landowner has from county bureaucrats. I learned long ago that bureaucrats often will conveniently (for them) ignore the rules, until you point them out.

Our county assessor's office was a clear example of that. I've not yet lost an argument with them, but I acquired and studied the rules. They follow them, when they have to.

I've bumped into this in several Va counties.

A large problem with simply asking bureaucrats for a ruling is that if they make a mistake, no one is liable. You simply lose. We ran into that here, and a friend spent several thousand dollars in preparation for his plan, only to learn later that it could never be approved. The county senior planner screwed up, gave us the wrong opinion.
 
I would go talk to the county SWCD. The Rural Preserve program in conditional on the Soil and Water Conservation District board's approval of your plan for the land. If the SWCD wants to tell you that you can't do anything with the land, I suppose that's tough beans. You'll just have to elect a better board if you want things changed.

If it was me, I would leave it in Green Acres. A solar fencer and some poly posts will get up and grazing in no time. If the land is not in Green Acres currently, you might have a hard time getting it enrolled. Enrollment is pretty strict now. You really have to prove that the land is being used for production including a sworn affidavit and the owner's Schedule F from his 1040 to prove it.
 
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