This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors will be re-evaluating the Williamson Act this budget season, following a Fresnoland investigation which found that the county-run farm program has diverted almost a billion dollars earmarked for local schools, hospitals and roads to Westside mega-farms owned by out-of-state investors and Wall Street firms.
Facing a $15 million budget deficit this year in his first term on the county board, Supervisor Garry Bredefeld said he is hunting for ways to claw back money for the county — and the Williamson Act in Fresno County is on his to-do list.
“It’s something that I want to take a look at,” Bredefeld said. “I plan on doing so in terms of how it’s being run and some of the issues that were raised in the article…tremendous points were raised.”
Since 2016, the annual costs of the Williamson Act in Fresno County have more than doubled to over $50 million, according to county tax records, running up to over $800 million in costs since the 1990s.
If the program disappeared overnight, most county farmers enrolled in the Act would hardly notice, an analysis of the county’s tax rolls shows. Half of the farmers in the program receive on average about $800 in tax breaks each year. About 3,000 parcels of farmland get nothing back from the program on their annual property tax bill.
In Imperial County, data suggests the trade-offs of ending the program on farmers are small. Since county supervisors there chose to end the Williamson Act in 2010, it’s been a win-win for schools and farms, data shows. The total amount of farmland under cultivation has increased, according to annual county ag reports, while ag property revenues going to schools have surged.
If the Board of Supervisors decide to take significant action on the Act, the primary loser will be foreign investors and real estate syndicates, whom the county has graced with new, multi-million tax breaks on in recent years.
In one case, a $200 billion pension fund for the Canadian Royal Police received one of Fresno County’s biggest tax breaks: $1.6 million. Others include the Assemi family ($1.7 million) and Gladstone Land Corporation ($1.1 million).
“A lot of large corporations were getting millions of dollars in tax breaks,” Supervisor Nathan Magsig said, “And a lot of the small farmers weren’t able to realize large breaks. So I found that to be interesting.”
Bredefeld said that he will request this budget season a report from county staff and the county’s tax chief, Paul Dictos, about how the $5 billion tax shelter is administered and whether it’s living up to its goals as a farmland preservation program.
“There are four or five things that I’ll be bringing before the board, and that [the Williamson Act] is certainly on my list after having looked at what was outlined in the article,” Bredefeld said.
Why is Fresno County subsidizing the retirement of Canadian cops?
The Williamson Act has been around since the late 1960s. The program has a loyal following across the state, described by state officials as one the most successful agricultural policies in American history.
“It is a national security issue, making sure that agriculture is able to thrive. I know that there are a lot of threats,” said Magsig, a farm bureau member, about his thoughts on agriculture policy.
But a deep-dive into the program, using never-before-used data, shows that the Act is actually a massive failure.
The Act works by allowing farmers to sign up for a tax break in return for their promise that they won’t sell the farm to real estate developers for 10 years. But in practice, the farmer’s promise has been worth less than the paper it’s printed on.
In every corner of California, the Act has been too weak to stop farmers lucky enough to cash out on their farmland. From Orange County to Silicon Valley, hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland originally enrolled in the Williamson Act in the 1970s has disappeared today under a sea of mini malls and bungalows.
For example, take the small farmers in southeast Fresno, where truck farms and world-class vegetables have been grown for generations. Despite the Williamson Act having a strong presence there, city documents show that planners for a 45,000-home mega-project simply expect these farmers to opt out of their Williamson Act tax break when it’s most convenient for them and developers in the coming years.
Most of the leftover farmland in Fresno County — 1.6 million acres — faces no real threat of development but still receives generous tax breaks from the county.
An hour’s drive from the nearest major subdivision, the county’s biggest Williamson Act tax breaks are going to plots of land bought less than 10 years ago by big investors and local families who bought out small farmers for as much as $30,000/acre. Normally, these investors would have to pay county property taxes based on their purchase price — some of which climbed as high as $250 million.
The Williamson Act exempted these new landowners from paying roughly $25 million in taxes every year. Since 2011, the tax breaks reaped by the county’s top 120 farmers through the Act increased by 500%.
Those that paid the highest price for land ended up getting the biggest tax breaks, according to Dictos, such as the retirement fund for the Canadian Royal Police.
County accountability has faded
The majority of the tax revenues taken by mega-corporations would go to school districts, especially poor ones which rely on state funding to make up for local revenue shortfalls: Mendota, Caruthers and Huron Unified.
But previous tenures of county supervisors have taken a hands-off approach on the Williamson Act since 2016, investigation showed, allowing costs to balloon with little discussion of whether the trade-offs off the program are worth it.
Until now. Despite county revenues coming in above-forecast this year in almost every category, the county is facing a budget deficit. This is due to unplanned increases in overtime to the Sheriff’s Office, according to a county analysis, which unexpectedly grew the entire cop and jail budget by roughly 13%.
“I’d have to see the tax statements that Paul [Dictos] has and go from there,” said Supervisor Buddy Mendes about looking into the Williamson Act going forward.
Magsig said that as Trump’s trade war heats up, he is hesitant to turn even the biggest agricultural operations into the county’s piggyback.
“All of this is impacting our ability to produce food and fiber,” Magsig said, “But I’m willing to look at anything that any of my colleagues here on the board put up together.”
