Dear Editor,
If we value farmers and what they produce, then Richmond has a duty to protect its farmland, the best in B.C., from being used for other purposes or left vacant because our real estate tax regulations make it financially more attractive than farming.
To do that, Richmond needs tools that encourage owners of land in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) to use it for farming.
Discouraging its use for palatial estates by limiting house size is an important first step, but that is not the only problem.
At the Jan. 23 meeting of Richmond City Council, a young farmer expressed her frustration at being unable to rent vacant farmland from a number of owners who are not farmers and have no incentive to allow the land to be farmed.
We need a way to make it cheaper to farm the land than to use it for other purposes or leave it vacant. The easiest way to do that is to have high municipal taxes on ALR land that is not used for farming.
BC Assessment currently puts land that is even minimally farmed in a separate “Class 9 Farmland” tax assessment class so that municipalities can set a different municipal tax rate for farms.
ALR land that is not farmed is instead put in the same tax assessment class as residential land and pays the same municipal taxes as everyone else.
However, all land in the ALR benefits from an automatic 50 per cent reduction in school taxes making it cheaper for a land speculator to hold ALR land than to hold regular residential land.
To reverse that, we need to create a new “ALR Land” tax assessment class and set its municipal taxes at a much higher rate.
The power to create a new tax assessment class resides with the province.
It is a simple process because the province already knows what land is in the ALR. Since even minimally-farmed land is in the Class 9 Farmland tax assessment class, that will leave only unfarmed ALR land, with or without a home on it, in the new class.
Then Richmond can raise municipal taxes on the new class sufficiently to make speculation and other uses much less attractive.
Other municipalities that are happy with the present system can tax the new class at the same rate they use now.
Some land speculators and palatial home owners may rush out to find farmers for their land in order to get it transferred from the new “ALR Land” tax class to Class 9 Farmland. If so, we will be way ahead of where we are now.
Those landowners who simply pay the higher municipal taxes will benefit all the other Richmond taxpayers since the more they pay, the less everyone else has to pay.
City council can ask the province to create a new “ALR Land” property assessment class. If the province doesn’t do so promptly, the city can make it an election issue.
John Roston
Steveston
