Charles Frederick says the more than 300 acres of steep, rolling hollows he owns near this speck on the map in southwestern Illinois isn't of much intrinsic value beyond the wild turkey and deer he has hunted on it.
Sure, it's scenic. But this Monroe County timberland he's owned for the past few years about 40 miles southeast of St. Louis, along with 70 acres of neighboring farmland he's leasing to someone else, largely is rough and remote, accessible only by four-wheel drive over a rutted, dirt path.
His tax bill on all that land last year - $1,111.80 - reflects its lack of utility and is an amount he's comfortable paying. But he and many others with wooded tracts now fret that their property tax liabilities soon may balloon, and state lawmakers are scrambling to step in.
The worry comes as the state Department of Revenue, arguing that many rural property owners for years have gotten a big break because of inconsistencies among the state's 102 counties in how wooded land is assessed, now wants everyone to do it the same.
Many assessors had classified those tracts - those not used for farming or timber but that stand alone or abut farmland - as "waste farmland" or "idle" and assigned them a much lower value. But under state rules, such land is "non-farm property" and should be valued at the higher rate of one-third of market value, state revenue officials said.
The change could result in higher assessments for many wooded properties and, by extension, higher taxes on them, stoking concern among some lawmakers that the potentially steeper tax bills could leave cash-strapped owners little choice but to sell the land to developers or develop it themselves, erasing its natural state.
No one knows for sure how many property owners would be affected or how much their taxes could rise under the revised rates. But some lawmakers have estimated the tax spike could be huge, perhaps mushrooming to $50 to $70 an acre from just $2 now in a state where about 90 percent of forest land is privately owned. About 53,000 landowners own at least 15 acres of forest, according to the state Department of Natural Resources.
The uncertainty has 70-year-old Frederick worried "big time."
"I could pay it," the retired utility worker for the tiny village of Dupo said of a potentially higher property tax bill. "But boy, there's no income coming off that land except a little bit of farm ground. Down the road, I bet, I'd be forced to sell it."
State lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are stepping in, pushing measures generally calling for property values on wooded tracts to be kept near current rates. In some of the proposals, counties would assess wooded land based on the value of the timber it could produce - keeping taxes near their current rates - or assign a value of $500 per acre, with taxes based on the lesser of the amounts.
Another measure, sponsored by state Rep. Dan Reitz, D-Steeleville, would require county assessors to wait two years before making any drastic change and create a task force to equitably sort it all out, giving landowners time to at least prepare for "sticker shock."
"It's a very complicated issue, and we want to try to find a way to do this right," he said.
The Department of Revenue deferred questions for this story to Gov. Rod Blagojevich's office, which spokesman Gerardo Cardenas said is willing to consider a tax freeze until the matter is resolved.
Dave Henderson, chair of the state's Chief County Assessment Officers Association's legislative committee, estimates that two-thirds of county assessors statewide have innocently not been in compliance with the classification guidelines, perhaps either because they were unaware of those parameters or lacked the tools to enforce them.
"A lot of these things were set up almost 25 to 30 years ago, and a lot of the people who set these up are no longer around," said Henderson, Grundy County's assessor. "So a lot of (assessors) out there are just continuing on with what the policies were when they got there."
"The majority of the assessors in this state are basically waiting to see what's happening in Springfield," Henderson said. "We need to study this thing."
Reitz worries that drastic spikes in property-tax bills for owners of wooded land might prompt them to cut down the trees. That's something Frederick doesn't plan for his tracts, though without meaningful legislative help he admits, "I don't know what's going to happen to that property."
Frederick suspects that if developers got hold of his land, some of which sits on a bluff overlooking a valley of natural wetlands, they would clear away all the timber.
"The sad part is, when it's gone it's gone forever," he said.
In far southeast Illinois near Carmi, John Campbell owns about 1,200 acres that's part farmland and part woodland the hunting outfitter uses to stalk and kill white-tail deer. And while he's not wild about possibly steeper taxes, he says the Department of Revenue "does have a legitimate case that the land is more valuable" than it was perhaps just a decade ago.
Campbell, a 49-year-old grower of corn, soybeans and wheat on roughly 12,000 other acres, about two-thirds of which he leases, hopes both sides take time to study the matter and, if anything, consider "a happy medium" - raise taxes on timberland while lowering those on farmland.
"Right now, farmland is bearing too much of a tax burden and timberland bearing too little," he said.Associated Press via St. Paul Pioneer Press
