Land Sale! Just north of Rapid City. 50 Acres for Sale at $250 per acre!!! Come Now!
Something never sat right with me during the last special election. I am not morally against TIFs, and I certainly do not need another primer about what they are. They can be useful. They can be harmful. It is a tool. I voted “No” because I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being deceived. Perhaps it was just my natural skepticism. Or maybe it was the lightning pivot from “Decline to Sign” to “Vote YES for Team RC”. Perhaps it was the lack of comprehensive information. Maybe the “abolish all property tax” propaganda got to me? I could not place it, but during the whole process, I felt like a patsy. See a sign, listen to the sign, vote like the sign. The signs are green and I like green. Don’t ask too many questions, just go along with it.
The proponents and opponents of Liberty Land never addressed this feeling of deception. Something is wrong with this proposal, but what is it? Roughly 70% of voters went against the project. Other folks feel the same thing. Is there a deception going on? Was this a corporate plot to convert taxes into profits? Or was this an economic development project that got hit with bad press? Did I vote to slow down the growth of Rapid City?
When I started to look into this, I realized the deception I felt had nothing to do with the TIF. It has to do with how property tax is treated in this county. How shell companies are holding onto land around the city and paying nothing to keep it. This is not a problem with Liberty Land: this is a problem with our entire county. Your property taxes are up, but the whimsically named LLCs owning all the land surrounding the city are getting a free ride. This is a massive problem caused by “business friendly” politicians that sell out average citizens while pocketing huge profits. It’s too big to even discuss in one article. I am going to present a few examples, but this is in no way the whole story. I hope someone with actual investigative and writing skills picks this up, because our property tax problem is not going away.
Here is the proposed project for Liberty Land. Notice the “Sports Complex” land shown in as the odd green “W”.
Here is the same shot from RapidMaps. This is parcel # 2129100015 and its owned by Hay Ground LLC, a shell for the Liens.
This value of this land according to RapidMaps is $13,200. This parcel is over 51 acres of land! That is roughly $250 per acre. If this land were currently for sale at $250 per acre, how many acres would you buy? Seriously think about that, $250 per acre. How many? My little 1/3 acre plot in the city is valued at $77,000, almost $250,000 an acre. Yeah, this land is valued at pennies. The TIF pays the loan back through the increase in property tax generated. When the current land is valued as worthless, it makes paying the loan back a whole lot easier.
If land is this cheap, I figured I should buy some too. So I went on Zillow to look for land priced around $250/acre. There are 40 acres for sale on Nike Road, just a couple miles north of the proposed Sports Complex, listing price: $365,000 or about $9,000 an acre. The listing is for a portion of the current tax parcel (2118200001), which has a total of 320 acres at a total taxable value: $175,100 or about $546 an acre. The entire 320 acres is valued at less than the listed 40 acre portion. What the hell is going on?
There are 7.5 acres for sale within city limits just past the Coca-Cola plant, listing price is $600,000 or about $80,000 an acre. This plot is assessed at $249,200 or $33,000/acre. This is more reasonable, but it is still less than half of the listing price. South Dakota state law requires land be valued at the “full and true value” and then taxed at 85% of that value. This is not happening. The Pennington County Director of Equalization in responsible for assessing property values and county commissioners have oversight of this function. I looked at one of our commissioners, Ron Weifenbach, and he owns over 4.2 million dollars of property in Pennington County, and that is just at the assessed value. Getting rid of free rides doesn’t mean abolishing property tax, it means making sure that land is being valued properly.
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