One unexpected person to show up for OFU’s recent Legislative Day at the Ohio General Assembly in Columbus was Amy Eddings, a correspondent from the Lima News. She’s been hearing about the explosive increases in CAUV-derived farmland property tax rates in western Ohio and she got an earful when she followed some of our members on legislator visits.
From her column:
For all the derisive talk from the presidential campaign about lobbyists, I half expected Tony Giesige to have two horns and a pointy tail.
But there he was, in a denim shirt, blue jeans and sneakers, and no devilish accoutrements in sight. If I were to see anything coming out of his head, it would probably be steam, so worked up is he about his property taxes.
“From 2007, it went from $5 an acre up to $60 an acre on the same piece of ground,” he told me, his voice bouncing off the marble floor and high dome of the rotunda at the state Capitol in Columbus. “And the prices are going down for the crops at the same time.”
Giesige owns 150 acres of farmland in Henry County, in the Great Black Swamplands north of Leipsic and west of Bowling Green. He grows corn, soybeans and wheat. He was one of about seven farmers from northwestern Ohio who drove to Columbus to meet with their elected representatives and press them to change the formula used to calculate the CAUV, the every-three-years Current Agricultural Use Value assessments for farmland property taxes.
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