This story was originally published by Fresnoland. Don’t miss the first part of this two-story investigation here.
During his 14 years as county tax chief, Paul Dictos has repeatedly tried to reform the Williamson Act in Fresno County, a statewide land program that doles out more than $50 million in tax breaks annually to local farms.
Over the years, he’s watched those tax breaks in Fresno flow increasingly away from local and small farmers, to hedge funds, pension funds and other investors with offices in New York, Virginia, Georgia and even Canada.
It’s a lesson, he says, that once you start giving a gift, it’s nearly impossible to stop giving it. He’s seen some of these tax breaks go up 200% to 300% during his tenure. In Fresno County, half of all farmers in the program receive an average tax break of just $800, while the biggest 0.3% of farmers – roughly 120 entities – enjoy subsidies three times higher per acre.
The story repeats itself across the state, from the almond orchards of Kern County to the vineyards of Napa Valley, where venture capitalists have splurged on land at $500,000 an acre or more. In each case, the Williamson Act made these land deals even sweeter. Instead of paying taxes on their sky-high purchase prices, the venture capitalists were taxed on modest rental income from their farms—slashing their tax bills by as much as 75%.
In Fresno County, which has the second-most land enrolled in the Act, Dictos blames county supervisors for repeatedly refusing to reform the tax breaks even though the county is losing tens of millions of dollars each year. In one of California’s poorest counties, those revenues could come in handy for any number of amenities, Dictos reasons.
“Five people run this county. I don’t like that,” he says. “What happens to the poor people? They get fucked.”
It’s not by accident that Dictos doesn’t share quarters with the county’s board of supervisors. He spent years saving department funds so that he could build a home base away from the Hall of Records – two city blocks, to be exact. He had his hand in designing the two-story assessor’s office on the corner of Van Ness and Merced Street, where Greek-style columns inspired by his homeland grace the entrance. Walk through the doors and a visitor quickly gleans that Dictos’ quarrel isn’t with farming itself. Hanging from the walls, as if in celebration, are Monet-sized homages to valley agriculture painted by homegrown artists.
Step inside his office, where he hands out his recipe for Greek yogurt, and he’ll show you a list that nobody else in the state has compiled — the subsidies doled out in Fresno County by the Williamson Act over the last 30 years. The numbers tell him it’s a boondoggle that keeps on giving, he says. According to a Fresnoland analysis of county records, the tax breaks go up 10% per year. By the end of his current term in 2028, Dictos forecasts the Act will cost the county more than $70 million annually in lost tax revenues.
“How did such a giveaway happen?” he asks.
At first, it was never Dictos’ ambition to question the Williamson Act, let alone who wielded power in Fresno County and how these forces engineered a whole way of life.
When the Act was signed into law by Gov. Pat Brown in 1965, Dictos was stuck in a foxhole in the Balkans, fending off Turkish colonizers with a military surplus rifle from WWI on behalf of his native Greece and NATO. Soon after, he emigrated to Fresno and became an accountant and father of three. Through the years, his Greek accent has remained heavy – inflected by a kind of manic charge.
An outsider to the cozy world of Fresno politics, Dictos decided in 2010 to run for county assessor. In a surprising victory, he beat three insiders. His first day on the job, Dictos was told by staffers the credo of the outgoing tax chief: “Never raise the taxes of the growers. You’ll never get reelected.”
That’s when Dictos said he began to investigate the Williamson Act, California’s biggest land program, run by the state’s Department of Conservation. He soon learned the tax bill for some of the most valuable farmland in the world was kept artificially low for reasons that were almost entirely political and reflected the power of a handful of mega-growers and cattlemen.
Named after Kern County Assemblyman John Williamson, the Act offered farmers and ranchers a simple deal: In exchange for a promise not to convert their land into strip malls and chain stores, they would receive generous tax breaks. To the county’s agricultural boosters, the program was touted as an outstanding success. By 2011, 1.6 million acres of local farmland were cashing in on the program, their owners collectively receiving $25 million in tax subsidies that year.
In Fresno, where farmers were exiting their Williamson Act contracts faster than almost anywhere else in the state, the Williamson Act turned out to be a subsidy too good to be true.
“The preservation part was mostly a cover story,” Dictos said. “By the time I got here, the Act was a tool for the county to keep the farmers happy.”
The county’s tactics were systematic. Under the Act, farmers’ tax bills were based on their land’s potential rental income from farming. To artificially lower these rental values, and thus the resulting tax bills, the county inflated various “risk factors” that reduced the estimated rental income. The assessor’s office, Dictos said, would cite decades-old scandals like selenium contamination or hike risk estimates whenever interest rates dropped. The county also used outdated crop yield data that understated farms’ actual productivity. In western Fresno County, home to the largest farming operations, these manipulated calculations translated into millions in additional tax breaks annually, Dictos found.
The deception went deeper. Farmers were keeping their tax bills artificially low by reporting less valuable crops on their books. An almond orchard might be listed as a raisin vineyard in county records, Dictos found, since grapes generated lower rental income and therefore smaller tax bills. Some growers had been playing this game for decades.
“It was an abuse of the system that went undetected for years,” Dictos said.
Among the tax-subsidized parcels, Dictos found something even more brazen. Some of the land wasn’t farmland at all. A skeet shooting club in Kerman was getting farm tax reductions. Near Coalinga, an abandoned asbestos mine was enrolled in the agricultural preservation program. And in the middle of Fresno, a toothless man was running what Dictos called a “racket ranch,” collecting farm tax breaks on an empty lot to peddle rocks to landscapers.
Dictos reported to the board of supervisors shortly after he came on board that 5% of the inspected farms were in clear violation of program requirements. One out of five of the recipients of the tax break were based on out-of-date crop records. “This initial study showed tons of abuse. Extrapolated, we’re looking at multi-million dollar fraud happening across the county,” he said.
As Dictos pored over maps and tax rolls, a more troubling pattern emerged beyond the paperwork violations. The entire geography of the Act was backwards. The largest tax breaks were flowing to vast agricultural holdings dozens of miles from the nearest city, in areas where suburban development wasn’t a threat and never would be. What, then, was the Act truly protecting?
Determined to understand the full scope of this distortion, Dictos recalls driving out to Fresno’s suburban edge, where developers’ checkbooks posed a genuine threat to farmland. But what he found was something else entirely: mega-mansions, Olympic-sized swimming pools, and basketball courts – all collecting agricultural tax breaks without a crop in sight. Here, he said, the program designed to protect working farms had become a subsidy for luxury estates.
Do these landowners really need a tax break?
He went home and sent out a questionnaire to the landowners. Their responses were surprisingly candid. “I bought this parcel in 1997 for speculation; I am not a farmer,” one read. “This is my future home-site,” read another. Another simply stated: “This is not a farm, and I am not a farmer.”
As Dictos prepared to go to the county’s leaders about his findings, he realized that he had stumbled upon a pattern that went far beyond Fresno County. The Williamson Act writ large told the statewide story about how a farmland program was quietly siphoning away billions of dollars in taxpayer funds over the decades.
“It was a shame hiding in plain sight,” he said. “But the farmers were shameless about it.”
How big ag shaped the Williamson Act early on
The problems Dictos unearthed traced back to 1965, when the Act first took shape in Sacramento. John Williamson, a former Bakersfield gas station owner turned state assemblyman, had championed the law, but in an interview with a UC Santa Barbara student in the 1980s, he revealed how agricultural interests had hijacked his original vision.
Williamson’s first concession went to the Cattlemen’s Association, a lobbying group representing California’s largest landowners.
The Cattlemen insisted that county supervisors be allowed to extend the Act’s tax breaks to agricultural land anywhere in their jurisdiction—not just the prime farmland that Williamson had initially aimed to protect. This meant vast tracts of remote rangeland, facing no real development pressure, would qualify for tax relief.
The second came at the eleventh hour, Williamson told Rebecca Conrad, the researcher. On the final day of the legislative session, the League of Cities—representing developer interests—cornered Williamson.
Their demand was a massive concession: Williamson agreed that his Act would not prevent developers from converting any farmland within three miles of city borders into subdivisions and strip malls. But before this promise could be enacted, voters removed him from office. By 1968, developers had secured an even better deal: cities could now strip the Act’s protections from any farmland within a mile of their boundaries.
Essentially, the Act was hollowed out before the ink was dry. The first concession created a lopsided incentive system – counties could now hand out generous tax breaks to remote landowners for “protecting” land that faced no development pressure. Meanwhile, the second concession put California’s most vulnerable agricultural land at the mercy of pro-growth city councils.
The results were devastating. As the Act rolled out across California in the 1970s, some of the state’s richest agricultural land vanished beneath subdivisions and strip malls.
In Alameda County, a UC Hastings Law Journal found, the Act arrived too late, with barely any farmland left to protect. In Contra Costa County, where agriculture still had a presence, few farmers chose to participate in the program. They were too lured by the financial promise of selling to developers for the Act’s restrictions to ever gain traction.
Across the Bay, Santa Clara County should have been the Williamson Act’s crowning achievement. Here was everything the program needed to succeed: 225,000 acres of California’s richest farmland, blessed with Class-I soil that could grow almost anything and owned by farmers who eagerly signed up for the Act’s protections.
But as Silicon Valley experienced its meteoric rise, the Act’s modest tax incentives proved no match for the fortunes to be made in tech. Farmers began quietly withdrawing from the program, either paying nominal fees to exit early or simply waiting out their 10-year contracts before selling. In the end, the Williamson Act wasn’t just beaten in Santa Clara County – it was rendered irrelevant.
The Williamson Act’s collapse didn’t just come down to political manipulation. It was also a profound failure of state oversight. Williamson had included a powerful backstop with state agencies that could have prevented much of California’s farmland loss, but state officials never used it.
This oversight mechanism was one of the most ambitious parts of Williamson’s original vision: counties were required to establish “agricultural preserves” – designated zones where development was legally prohibited and farmers could receive tax breaks. According to a UC Hastings Law Journal analysis, these preserves weren’t just symbolic boundaries. They gave state regulators real legal authority to block attempts to rezone and pave over protected farmland, even after farmers exited their contracts.
But the Department of Conservation, which was responsible for overseeing this part of the Act, didn’t even maintain basic records of where the preserves were located, effectively neutering their own enforcement powers, the UC Hastings article found.
It was an uncomfortable truth inside their offices that the Williamson Act was presiding over the paving of farmland, said Stephen Oliva, the former general counsel of the state’s Department of Conservation. But for decades, nobody ever spoke up to right the ship.
“It would have been inconvenient to have the data (about the agricultural preserves) out there for the county, because a lot of them became pro-growth,” Oliva said.
Weak state oversight, combined with county supervisors’ unwavering support for large landowners, allowed the Williamson Act to achieve the opposite of its intended purpose. It failed to protect prime farmland near cities and rewarded remote landowners who faced no threat of urbanization. The program’s reach expanded far beyond its original mission – eventually encompassing one-third of all privately owned land in California. Critics now call the Williamson Act one of the biggest policy failures in state history.
“It seemed like it had become a tax break mechanism more than anything else,” said Chris Butcher, a legal scholar at the Department of Water Resources who studied the Act’s failures at UC Davis in the 2000s.
“Probably because of the influence of those who were benefiting, there was no desire to change it.”
A corrupt cattle king wrote the playbook in 1869. Today’s farm empires still use it.
The outcomes of the Williamson Act didn’t just stem from it being a flawed farmland preservation program. Its resilience stemmed from how California’s agricultural empires had changed Williamson’s namesake law, in secret, in 1966. When Dictos began investigating the Act’s true beneficiaries, he was unknowingly pulling at threads that went back to Henry Miller, the state’s first agricultural titan.
The Williamson Act enshrined in modern California the same preferential tax treatment that Miller had secured through widespread corruption in the 1860s: paying taxes based on farming income rather than true land value. Under Dictos’ watch in the 2010s, this tax rule would shield billions in farmland acquisitions from taxation as hedge funds and mega-farmers bought out their smaller neighbors at a dizzying pace.
In the San Joaquin Valley, land had always been the most valuable asset – and Miller had written the playbook for getting it and keeping it. At the time of his death in the 1920s, the New York Times reported that Miller was likely the largest private landowner in world history. Control of land meant control of wealth, and to achieve this at unprecedented scales in the heart of California, a book by UC professor David Igler shows, Miller’s first step was to assemble an army of influence peddlers and fixers.
In the 1860s, he and his partner, Charles Lux, paid a federal land program expert $10,000 a month (equivalent to $250,000 today) to acquire as much Valley land as possible through any available means – from Reclamation to Swamplands to Sioux Indian programs. They retained Leland Stanford’s attorney, considered the most talented lawyer of his generation, to fend off scandal and fight for his land and water rights. A disgraced former head of the State land office, run out of Sacramento for his Confederate sympathies, found new purpose as Miller’s top lobbyist. It was like the Avengers, but for land corruption.
One judge, infamous for his fondness of whiskey and deciding complicated land disputes with no written rationale, handed Miller tens of thousands of acres. The judge, as it happened, owed Miller’s lawyer money. Through a web of aliases and distant relatives, Miller later exploited federal homesteading programs, acquiring vast tracts for a fraction of their value. His empty lands, suddenly populated by phantom settlers, expanded his holdings year after year.
Miller and his legal buccaneers grew his empire so vast that he could ride horseback from Mexico to Canada and sleep at one of his ranches each night. The implications of Miller’s land grab would reverberate across California for generations. It was the seed of a 150-year war over land, water and taxes.
At first, the scale of Miller’s land empire sparked a constitutional crisis in Sacramento. By 1870, the concentration of wealth reached staggering proportions – just 13 individuals controlled over 3.1 million acres in the San Joaquin Valley. Soon after, Governor Henry Haight and the state legislature took unprecedented action, convening a special constitutional convention to address what they saw as a dangerous consolidation of land and power.
The convention’s most significant outcome was the creation of California’s State Board of Equalization in 1870. The Board targeted a key pillar of Miller’s power: a tax system that allowed agricultural empires to pay property taxes based only on their farming income, rather than their land’s true value.
When state investigators arrived in Fresno County in the winter of 1870, according to state records, they discovered the local assessor was granting landowners like Miller tax discounts of roughly 60%. The Board’s solution was swift and decisive: all property, including farmland, would now be taxed at full market value. The impact rippled across California as property tax revenues more than doubled within two years.
This reform struck at the heart of Miller’s business model. The state hoped that taxing the true worth of his vast holdings would force him to redistribute land to California’s newcomers.
But Miller had built his estate through political influence as much as acreage. The same network of greased palms and backroom deals that had built his empire would now be deployed to save it.
“Dread him well. He is a bad egg, and we must buy him,” Miller wrote of the resistant Merced County assessor shortly after the tax reforms. Across the valley, Miller distributed choice parcels to government officials in exchange for more lenient tax treatment.
In Fresno, William Faymonville, a prominent businessman and Miller’s inside man, orchestrated an audacious bit of electoral manipulation. The incumbent tax collector, deemed insufficiently compliant, was to be ousted. “He is no friend of [Miller and Lux] and never has been,” Faymonville wrote to Miller. For tax assessor, Faymonville favored John Stroud. “He can be managed,” he assured Miller, outlining a plan to stuff the ballot box in Firebaugh with votes for their chosen candidate using Miller’s local canal manager.
When election season came, Miller’s man won the day. For good measure, Faymonville was installed as Fresno County’s deputy assessor. With both men in place, the county assessor’s office promised Miller they would undo the tax board’s reforms and apply the old tax rules to him. Faymonville later wrote to Miller that he would secure up to 80% tax discounts. “I shall succeed in having your land assessed at $1/acre. At least I have no reason to believe the board of supervisors will find fault with that.”
The success of Miller’s tax manipulation launched his lieutenants into positions of extraordinary local influence. Faymonville parlayed his role as Miller’s assessor into becoming Fresno’s first mayor, while his $10,000-a-month land manager accumulated enough wealth to acquire title to most of the city of Fresno. The cozy symbiosis of public office and private interest had found its template.
What Miller started was a landowner revolution at every level of government — stretching from local county assessment rolls to the marbled halls of Congress. In time, his heirs would run his empire into the ground. But the playbook Miller perfected — the alchemy of political influence, creative tax avoidance, and engineered landscapes — would prove irresistible.
Across the valley, new dreamers, some hailing from the plantation South, rushed in to follow his lead for the next century. While agricultural land monopolies in other states dissolved by the 1890s, Miller’s drive for low taxes and subsidized water projects kept inland California’s wealth disparities in place for generations.
Colonel J.G. Boswell emerged as a prime example. Operating in the bottom of old Tulare Lake, the Colonel manipulated bureaucratic rivalries to win approval for a dam on the Kings River, becoming the nation’s biggest cotton grower, Mark Arax shows in King of California. Through the federal government, Boswell finally brought Miller’s original water project vision to life, transforming taxpayer-funded flood control infrastructure into a private irrigation empire.
In Fresno, the agricultural elite truly perfected this lucrative approach. Here, Miller’s influence would shape some of the state’s most transformative agricultural policies right up to the passage of the Williamson Act.
In the 1950s, Russell Giffen, the undisputed cotton king of Fresno County, handpicked a malleable tire salesman named B.F. Sisk to be the growers’ man in Congress, Arax’s later book, the Dreamt Land, shows. Sisk’s mission: to charm and cajole the federal government into building a sweeping irrigation system that would transform 600,000 acres of selenium-laced scrubland on the county’s western flank into new cotton ground.
To secure the Bureau of Reclamation’s approval, Sisk painted a misleading picture of the Westside land the government would be subsidizing. Like Miller, he evoked a false vision of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian ideal of small homestead farms, while knowing he was carrying the water for large landowners.
Along with allies Jack O’Neill and Frank Diener, Giffen channeled the federal water into the Westlands Water District, which would become America’s most powerful irrigation district. Giffen’s crop subsidies alone, according to the National Land for People archives, would mark him as the second-largest recipient of public welfare in the country.
But there was one obstacle in their path. With crop subsidies high and cheap federal water reaching into new stretches of desert, the agricultural empires were expanding — and so were their tax bills.
The year the Act was signed, the per-acre value of California’s agricultural land had increased 500% over the span of a single generation, according to geographer Don Mitchell. The State Water Project, which Sisk had helped initiate, increased the land value of roughly 100 individuals and corporations — including Boswell, Standard Oil, Southern Pacific — by $780 million by 1968 ($7.2 billion, adjusted for inflation), according to an investigation at the time compiled by Ralph Nader.
To avoid paying taxes on this windfall, the major landowners united to replicate the tax system Miller had relied on for the survival of his expanding empire. They turned to the Williamson Act, changing its foundational rules to turn back the clock to the frontier days of 1865 and preserve their dominion over the land.
Billion dollar tax dodge: How the Act resurrected Miller’s old tax rules as water project tax bill loomed
The crisis which instigated the return of Miller’s old tax policies came shortly after the Act passed in the Assembly. At first, the law’s central promise – that farmers who signed non-development contracts would see lower property taxes – proved hollow.
Just months after its passage in 1965, county assessors simply ignored these contracts when calculating a farmer’s land values for property taxes, knowing farmers could easily break them by paying modest penalties or waiting out their terms when developers came calling. As a result, assessors continued to charge farmers near cities as if their land was already rezoned for subdivisions.
At first, the Act offered nothing to California’s agricultural giants either. Their vast holdings, often miles away from the nearest city, faced no development pressure to begin with. Whether they signed Williamson Act contracts or not made no difference to their tax bills. For them, the Act didn’t alleviate their real concern: the looming spike in their property tax bill caused by the huge water projects they had lobbied for.
The Act was caught in no-mans-land: too weak to protect urban-edge farmland from development pressure, yet offering no meaningful tax relief to the state’s mega-farmers. It was, in essence, a law without a constituency.
But where others saw a doomed law, California’s powerful landowners recognized its potential. In September 1966, Fresno County’s cattle barons stormed the halls of power downtown. The Fresno Bee described the show of force as “a little like government headquarters in a Latin republic when revolution is brewing.”
That day, the ranchers bellowed about their ballooning tax bills, a spectacle so unsettling that one county supervisor fell physically ill during the browbeating. The county board vowed to begin signing up growers for the Act’s tax breaks, which would soon undergo drastic changes.
Marshaling the same lobbyists who had helped pass the original Act, a National Science Foundation report found, Miller’s old rivals, Southern Pacific and other agricultural giants bankrolled a state ballot initiative to transform the Williamson Act. Under the guise of farmland preservation, they successfully exploited voters’ fears of suburban sprawl, the report found, particularly in outlying Bay Area counties like Napa and Marin. The Fall 1966 measure enshrined new tax rules in California’s Constitution that delivered windfall breaks to remote agricultural holdings, no matter how far from development pressure.
Their victory meant vast farming operations could now avoid being taxed on their land’s true market value, which was set to soar thanks to taxpayer-funded water projects. Instead, they could base their bills on relatively modest crop income – a return to the frontier-era system that Henry Miller had secured through corruption a century before.
A state inquiry a few years into the farm tax code changes revealed the winners. In just four years, the state’s average farm size had swollen by 37%. In Kern County, the biggest Williamson Act beneficiaries included Tejon Ranch, Getty Oil, and Standard Oil. In Kings County, J.G. Boswell and his rival, Clarence Salyer rode the Act’s biggest tax breaks. In Fresno, it was Giffen and Southern Pacific. The inquiry found that the state’s land concentration had changed little since the Henry Miller days: 13 companies owned 2.5 million acres of California.
After these changes, the Act proved to have remarkable staying power. By recasting these preferential tax arrangements as vital to farmland preservation, agricultural interests had engineered protections that would prove politically untouchable for generations to come.
One of the only people to challenge the Act’s new incarnation was John Krebs, a Jewish refugee who had fled the rise of the Third Reich for the promise of California. As a young lawyer in Fresno during the late 1960s, Krebs began asking pointed questions, according to Fresno Bee archives. Why, he asked publicly, did Westside landowners, already receiving huge crop subsidies and some of the cheapest water in California, need more tax subsidies from Fresno County?
The backlash was swift and severe. Krebs received death threats, according to Dictos and Krebs’ widow, Hanna Krebs. Agricultural interests branded him as an enemy of farming itself. But his questioning had exposed how the transformed Williamson Act was enabling a new phase of consolidation in the Valley.
During Krebs’ subsequent career in Congress, he watched this consolidation play out. J.G. Boswell fought and won battles to exceed acreage restrictions tied to his Army Corps of Engineers project on the Kings River, securing a long-term water supply for his empire. The big growers in Westlands got a similar victory too.
By the time Krebs was ousted from Congress in 1979, the modern framework of Valley agriculture was largely complete. The major water projects and delivery systems were in place, and public subsidies at every level – federal, state, and county – were now flowing primarily to the largest operations.
But the genie was out of the bottle. Krebs’ revelations would surface again, a generation later, in the hands of Dictos, the tax assessor. When Dictos began investigating the Williamson Act in 2011, he found himself excavating the same questions Krebs had raised decades earlier.
This time, the stakes would grow even higher, as hedge funds and Wall Street discovered the same tax advantages that Miller, Giffen, and Boswell had pioneered.
“Jealous that they didn’t get in on it.”
Dictos was no naive bureaucrat when he took on the Williamson Act.
His first Fresno job involved bookkeeping in the late 60s for the Model Cities Program, an anti-poverty initiative that challenged the city’s sprawl-centric General Plan. Dictos also did taxes for George Ballis, a fellow Greek who spearheaded the local campaign against Giffen and his associates during the congressional hearings in Krebs’ tenure.
What Dictos had found was a system of double-dipping—farmers not only avoided paying taxes on their land’s true value through a resurrected 1860s tax code, but then further reduced by understating their rental income through the county’s creative bookkeeping.
Normally, as a political newcomer, Dictos would have kept quiet about his discovery as part of the local rules – taking on the Williamson Act could have cost him valuable campaign support from the major landowners, as his staff told him. But as a tax assessor, Dictos’ role was a weird in-between that allowed him to be, for a brief moment, independent of this power structure.
Dictos had the technical acumen of a tax expert, but he wasn’t a bureaucrat whose position was so precarious that raising critiques of the system could cause him to be fired by elected officials. Dictos was an elected official himself, but his job description was narrow enough, with enough public backing from the tax angle, that he had an in-road to taking on the Act. All he needed was an opportunity to take it on.
He found it in the subprime mortgage crisis.
The housing collapse had exposed the Act’s failure to preserve farmland – thousands of acres of agricultural land had been paved over during the building boom, particularly in Fresno County, which ranked among California’s top five counties for annual farmland loss to sprawl. Now those subdivisions were hemorrhaging value, with home prices plunging 15%, according to a 2009 Pew Research study. As county coffers dried up, Dictos saw his chance to scrutinize the Williamson Act’s tax breaks.
Hungry for new revenue, Dictos targeted the vast acres of artificially deflated Williamson Act land. Dictos kicked out the “racket ranches” and raised taxes on profitable Westside giants. He updated their crop yields and unjiggered the county’s phony risk factors. In his first year, farm tax revenues surged 25%.
“’With friends like you, who needs enemies?’’” shot back Brian Pacheco, then-CEO of the County’s Farm Bureau and future county supervisor, in a local farming newspaper. “As farmers, we are just supposed to get our new tax bills and pay them without saying a word… I don’t think so.”
Dictos recalls when Jack Woolf, right-hand man to Russell Giffen, called about his new tax bill. Woolf had secured 8,000 prime acres near Huron after Giffen’s death.
“Come to my office. I want to see who the fuck you are,” Woolf demanded over the phone, according to Dictos.
Dictos drove uptown to Woolf’s office, on a quiet boulevard in northwest Fresno where mansions were planted all the way up to the banks of the San Joaquin River. Woolf sized Dictos up and inspected his new tax rolls from a binder prepared for him. The crop yields checked out. Woolf, who died in 2020, gave a curt nod. He shook Dictos’s hand as he showed him the door. “You’re all right,” Woolf conceded.
The Williamson Act was an open joke among supervisors, recalls former county supervisor Juan Arambula. One supervisor, Stan Oken, chuckled that big farmers were so cavalier about their Williamson Act scheming that they could fly over open land, throw out some alfalfa seed from their airplane cockpit and claim the empty ground for a tax break.
Soon, Dictos found out what kept the Williamson Act in place: local control. He had the political latitude to lead audits on the Act, but not enough political capital to begin to set it straight.
Dictos figured he’d need $350,000 to do a full audit of the county’s Williamson Act contracts. In 2013, the board of supervisors rejected the funding request.
When Dictos found funding from the state to get the audit done, the board got a super majority to block the funds from coming through a year later.
“At the time, we felt like he was being a bully, going above and beyond what the job entailed,” said Debbie Poochigian, a former county supervisor who voted against Dictos. “He went overboard. The rules weren’t being broken. It was being used as intended.”
Phil Larson, another county supervisor who voted against the reform efforts, said Dictos became his enemy when he started putting pressure on the Williamson Act and its farmers.
“He told me at my fundraising dinners that he wanted to protect farmland,” Larson said. “Then he went after farmers. He went after anyone who was profitable. He’s a liar to me.”
Dictos remembers a barbecue at the Borba family ranch during his conflict, an annual shindig on the banks of the San Joaquin. A big-time farmer pulled him aside and mumbled a warning: “You got a target on your back.”
Soon, a grand jury investigation was launched on Dictos’ new tax rolls. When published in 2013, the report failed to find fault with Dictos’ tax roll changes. In 2015, a probe by the state’s board of equalization arrived at a similar finding.
Ultimately, the county supervisors cut Dictos’ funding for years, forcing him to lay off more than a dozen staffers. “They cut their nose to spite their face,” said Dictos. “It was a vendetta.”
Farming politics “definitely” hindered Dictos’ Williamson Act oversight, said Susan Anderson, county supervisor at the time.
“I knew there were so many people who didn’t meet the qualifications, but nobody was looking,” she said. “It’s simple, no? Farming has always been such a big thing in Fresno County. It has a lot of influence on who gets elected.”
The pushback came from big farming families, Arambula said.
“I think Dictos saw an opportunity to correct some glaring flaws, and he’s been suffering ever since,” he said. “The Williamson Act primarily benefits the powerful farming generations, at the expense of everyone else. You try and mess with it, and it’s like trying to touch a hornet’s nest.”
The supervisors who voted against Dictos either owned farmland enrolled in the Williamson Act or had close family members who had land in the Act, according to county property records, newspaper accounts and interviews. Despite this fact, Poochigian and Judy Case never recused themselves from their Williamson Act votes. Both could not be reached to discuss their votes.
Neither did Larson recuse himself, even though he was a trustee for a thousand-acre almond ranch owned by the Westland-founder Diener family – a ranch that was reaping Williamson Act subsidies.
Larson said he didn’t see a problem with how the county doled out the tax breaks.
“What’s wrong with it? It means they got more money to spend,” he said. “The only foul I see is on guys like Dictos, who are jealous that they didn’t get in on it.”
“It’s BS,” says one supervisor. But no one dares fix a billion-dollar blunder.
Today, the Williamson Act has little to justify its existence, critics say.
Fundamentally, the very problem it sought to address—the loss of farmland near cities due to skyrocketing property taxes—vanished nearly half a century ago. Since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, property tax increases have been limited to 2 percent per year. Without the Williamson Act, most farmers’ tax bills would be the same, said Steve Wise, a current Tulare County assessor.
For the vast majority of agricultural landowners, he notes, Williamson Act enrollees actually reap less of a windfall than they would from Prop 13’s safeguards alone.
Dictos readily acknowledges that the Williamson Act has now become redundant. “Simply put, if Prop 13 existed before the Williamson Act, there would have been no need for the Williamson Act,” he said.
Instead, today, the Act has become a lucrative boon for a new breed of land baron: hedge funds, asset managers, and the titans of Wall Street, with their vast portfolios now sprawling to farmland. For these deep-pocketed investors, they have discovered a new golden goose in the Williamson Act.
By scooping up agricultural parcels at top prices, they have managed to reap colossal tax windfalls, all thanks to the Act’s legislative quirk that bases their taxes not on the sums they paid for the land, but rather on the comparatively meager income generated by the crops that sprout from its soil.
“Anyone who’s bought land in the last 10 years and paid $10,000, $20,000, $25,000 an acre – there’s big benefit in being in the Williamson Act,” said Donnie Carr, the Kern County assessor.
The law now finds itself in a bizarre position – protecting land facing no real threat of development, attempting to solve a problem that no longer exists, all while handing out tax breaks to multi-billion-dollar entities that critics say could get by just fine without them.
But questioning the giveaway for these corporate landowners at the expense of taxpayers is a political third rail for everyone involved.
It’s “political suicide,” said Carr about any attempt to reform the Act at the local level.
Unless the state intervenes, said Juan Arambula, the former County supervisor and state assemblyman, little will change.
“The Williamson Act is a carve-out, a giveaway. Has it worked? No. Are we protecting the most fertile land? No,” he said.
“It’s squandering resources with little to no public benefit. Honestly, the likelihood of a county board in the San Joaquin Valley taking a look into it are pretty slim.”
In Sacramento too, the state has shown little interest in reforming the program. In 2021, the state senate passed a law that eliminated most of the Act’s reporting requirements for counties, leaving the state with little insight into how the program is working on the ground. According to the most recent state report, 55% of participating counties in the Act no longer report any information to the state.
The Department of Conservation offered a muted response to the findings of this story: “The Williamson Act is locally administered and the Department of Conservation’s role is limited to providing technical support to local governments.”
Kern County assessor Carr put it more succinctly: “The state’s pretty much washed their hands of it. They’ve tried to distance themselves in every possible way.”
In this no-man’s-land of local control, the private sector seems to have no answers about how the Act functions in practice today either. The Fresno County Farm Bureau, a gathering place for third and fourth-generation farmers, has fallen silent on the issue of their members’ diminishing benefits.
Ryan Jacobson, the Bureau’s CEO and the son of two lineages of Fresno County farmers stretching back four generations, declined to respond to any of the findings for this story, dismissing it as a potential “hit piece.”
Jacobsen issued a statement arguing that agriculture needs more subsidies to remain viable in California, without addressing data showing the Act’s benefits flowing primarily to the largest operations while providing minimal relief to most farmers.
While no official records exist which provide a comprehensive estimate of the Act’s total subsidy statewide, Fresno County’s data may offer a glimpse of the scale of tax revenue lost to the program. If Fresno County’s 10% share of the program’s farmland is even remotely representative of the Act’s functioning across California, the annual cost in lost tax revenues could range from $250 million to $500 million statewide.
Over the past three decades, the Act’s cost to Fresno County alone is approximately $1 billion in lost revenues, according to county records. Extrapolating this figure to the entire state suggests that the total cost of the Williamson Act, long after most of the land it was designed to protect has vanished, could be as high as $10 billion—an amount equal to what California has invested in its ambitious high-speed rail project to date.
This staggering sum indicates that the state’s investment in large-scale agriculture and land consolidation, through the Williamson Act alone, rivals its most massive infrastructure endeavor.
Given the history of the state’s land monopolies, UCLA professor Stephanie Pincentl said she’s not surprised at this finding. Despite the obvious consolidation the Act is fueling, she sees little indication of any political force, either within agriculture or outside of it, rising to challenge the status quo.
“The Williamson Act is an anachronism today,” Pincentl said. “With the passage of Prop 13, which rendered the Act obsolete, the folks still benefiting from it haven’t wanted to draw much attention to it, because they are profiting from an Act that no longer serves its original purpose.”
Sergio Luna, a staffer at Imperial County’s assessor office, has found a similar dynamic when speaking with county tax officials across California. “I talked to other counties who decided to keep it going, and when I asked why? They said: ‘It’s political. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s a political decision.'”
The consequences of challenging this status quo are clear to those in county government.
“If you are against ag, you are putting your job in jeopardy,” said Imperial County assessor Robert Menvielle.
“Maybe it no longer serves a purpose,” Menvielle added. “But we’ll probably have Williamson until the legislature decides if we don’t need it anymore. It’s a relic.”
“They swept it under the rug.”
Since Dictos last took on the Williamson Act, the cost of the program has nearly tripled for Fresno County. Today, the majority of the Act’s tax break flows to roughly 120 farming operations. Thousands of farmers who are enrolled in the program receive zero tax benefit.
And yet, Fresno County’s top policymakers have yet to examine whether concentrating tax subsidies among the largest landholders serves the region’s agricultural future.
“In the years I’ve been on the board [since 2016], we really haven’t discussed much,” said former county supervisor Sal Quintero. “There really hasn’t been any issues on the Williamson Act.”
Mendes, a county supervisor and farmer, was at a loss for words regarding how the Act has panned out million-dollar tax breaks to mega-farmers.
He called the Canadian Royal Crown’s subsidy “BS,” but stopped short of saying any policy changes were needed.
“I think the county should be in the Act,” he said. “I’d have to see the list of [tax subsidy] recipients,” he added.
Nathan Magsig, another supervisor and member of the county farm bureau, was careful with his conclusions regarding the Act. Overall, he said that farmland should still be considered a privileged form of wealth which warrants a unique tax break.
“I want to do everything I can to make sure that people pay their fair share. But there are industries, like agriculture, which are more than just a business. It’s more than just a job creator,” Magsig said. “I like small farmers. I don’t have a bias against medium or large farmers. I’m a free-market capitalist.”
Brian Pacheco, a current county supervisor and ex-farm bureau president, declined to comment for this story.
Former Supervisor Steve Brandau also declined to comment on this story.
“I was accused, I was blamed, I was called a liar and an enemy of the farmer. After I was exonerated by the grand jury, the board still neglected to take a hard look at the Williamson Act,” Dictos said.
“They swept it under the rug.”
Want to dig deeper into this story? Join Fresnoland for a conversation next Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 5:30 p.m. at Sun Stereo Warehouse. Register to attend here.