A sea-land equality bill for local farm property tax breaks welcomed by harvesters and seafood producers, while some community officials oppose it.
The bill, which was passed unanimously by the Senate last week, would add underwater clam fish beds and certain waterfront clam shipping locations to the list of properties covered by the long-standing Public Act 490. The law allows arable land, forests, open spaces and maritime heritage to be valued by purpose rather than market value, resulting in lower property taxes. It is a soil conservation tool that allows owners to keep land that would otherwise be too expensive to hold.
Jim Markow, co-owner of Mystic Oysters with Jim Bloom, said the bill was necessary because the current tax framework does not recognize that its mussel beds are very limited.
“There is only land on which we can breed the shellfish, but we have no rights to the water column. We only have rights to the ground,” he said.
Combine that with the fact that some beds may only be used every few years and others every five or 10 years, he said.
“I had to mourn taxes before,” he said of his repeated visits to local examination boards. “Every year you get [the tax bill], it goes up and down and up. If you get stuck, your next step is to pay a ton of money for a piece of land that you may not use for a while. “
In a written testimony presented to the General Assembly’s Environment Committee in support of the law, Markov pointed to a particularly steep hike on a bed of clams in Mumford Cove, Groton, which was previously valued at $ 30 an acre.
Mary Gardner, appraiser at Groton, said the spike Markov was referring to was the result of a 2016 reassessment in which her department standardized the city’s five oyster beds to a value of $ 850 an acre. She said that Markov’s oyster bed was previously valued at $ 29 an acre, while the other four properties were valued at $ 1,000 an acre.
Gardner said she did not see much of an impact from the section of law that extends the definition of arable land to include underwater arable land for aquaculture. That’s because the current value assigned to oyster beds “treats them almost like they are already farmland,” she said.
However, she pointed to the part of the bill that broadens the definition of “land of maritime heritage” as a country with financial implications of which she is less certain. The language would extend tax benefits for farms on waterfront properties previously restricted to commercial lobster fishermen to licensed mussel shippers and aquaculture operators – provided that at least 50% of their adjusted gross income comes from commercial activities.
Gardner said she wasn’t sure yet how that language could affect the city’s big list.
A list of certified shellfish senders from the US Food and Drug Administration shows one in Noank. Other nearby coastal shipping shippers operate at locations such as Stonington, Mystic, and Niantic.
The law would come into force on October 1, 2021. It would not affect the local big list until the following financial year, according to the state parliament’s tax analysis office.
Bill sponsor and senator Christine Cohen, D-Guilford, said in a press release that Connecticut’s clam industry has annual sales of more than $ 30 million and employs 300 people nationwide.
State Senator Heather Somers, R-Groton, co-sponsored the bill.
“Consider this: just a few years ago we didn’t have any oysters in the Mystic River that you could actually use,” she said in a statement. “There are tens of millions of oysters in the Mystic River today, and our water quality has never been so clean. Hundreds and hundreds of aquaculture jobs have been created here in Connecticut.”
The public hearing statements contained opposition from the Connecticut Council of Small Towns and the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, according to a joint positive report prepared by the Environment Committee’s committee clerk.
The report said Donna Hamzy, advocacy manager at CCM, argued that the bill puts the burden of subsidizing aquaculture on the communities where the farms are located. She proposed a framework for paying taxes instead of taxes that includes state aid to maintain agriculture, rather than penalizing the communities that support it.
The bill would also redesign the Connecticut Seafood Advisory Council to be known as the Connecticut Seafood Development Council, adding two members, bringing the total to 13.
Markov welcomed the proposed change.
“They think of Boston and all these other places, they have a pretty big lobby and they go to great lengths with their marketing,” he said. “I think Connecticut has something special and nobody really knows about it.”
The bill is now going to the House for a vote.