Saturday, June 27, 2009
 
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Ins and outs of the Logan County property tax system

GIS: How new tools and formulas assess farmland

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[June 27, 2009]  Property owners who are ready and waiting for this year's tax bills won't wait much longer. Traditionally the bills appear in Logan County mailboxes the first week in June. This year it will be the first week in July.

RestaurantThe state released the county's final multiplier last week, and the bills were being prepared in the county treasurer's office this week to go out next week. First installments will be due July 30, with second installments due on Sept. 1.

A typical year

By state of Illinois regulation, the earliest possible date that bills might be ready for sending out would be May 1, but in practical terms, it would seem that no county would be able to actually do that. It is a complex, multi-step process that involves many entities and overlapping tax district.

Once the bills are sent, payment is due in 30 days.

Logan County hasn't had tax bills out before June 1 for many years, county finance chairman Chuck Ruben said. Others involved with the process agreed that the beginning of June is about the earliest possible date for any county.

Pharmacy

Delays are usually caused by waiting for figures from collar counties that have districts overlapping with Logan County. County Clerk Sally Litterly needs their levy information to do the extensions. McLean and one other county run late every year, preparers say.

An alternative would be to do as McLean County does: go to an accelerated taxing system. This involves sending two tax bills a year. The first bill is half of the previous year's bill, and the second bill integrates any changes in the balance due. Some counties do this because it gets their districts some money early, according to Rosanne Brosamer, supervisor of assessments. "But it's also costing their county a lot of money," she said. It doubles the processing and delivery costs -- postage, envelopes, bills and work -- she said.

Overhaul of assessment system completed

If you were passing by the assessor's office late this spring, you may have heard a collective sigh of relief the day they wrapped up this year's property assessments. This is the office where the biggest changes in the property tax system have occurred recently. Brosamer has spent the last two years implementing new state-mandated technological advances that have brought Logan County into the 21st century.

The primary purpose of the advancements is to more accurately assess land use, farmland and production. This year's assessments on farmland used the new Logan County Geographic Information System and either Bulletin 810 and Bulletin 811.

What is GIS and how is it used for land assessment?

The creation of the Logan County GIS began in 2004, when the entire county was over-flown and computer-aided ortho-digital photography was collected. Engineering specialists were then hired to assemble photos into a map. Streets, major landmarks and parcel lines were added later.

The GIS performs much like Google Earth. In the base layer you have a map. With a photo layer you can see detailed land features and structures.

Other overlays provide more specific and accurate geographic data that now contributes to an assessment value of farm property.

Land use

Land use now distinguishes between cropland, other farmland, permanent pastures, waste acres and structures. Aerial photos provide a more accurate depiction of how the land is being used. Brosamer said that GIS shows "what portion is cropland, what portion is in timber, what portion is in waterways and so on." She added that many differences in land use were found between the new, more accurate parcel maps and the old 1969-1981 maps.

Soil

Soil use, soil type, slope, erosion and flood plain areas, and other factors that affect crop production, are meshed with historical crop production data in an assessment of farmland.

An extensive soil survey was conducted by the USDA Department of Natural Resources Conservation Service. That information was put into the soil overlay for GIS. According to University of Illinois researchers, more than 80 new soil types and soil complexes have been identified on Illinois county soil survey maps since the year 2000.

The end result, using the GIS, is that parcel divisions are more precise, land features can be seen, and soil types can be collected for a more accurate evaluation of farmland.

"As expected, there were some glitches to work through during the processes," Brosamer said. Such as last year, the new parcel maps were used and later found to have errors in them that affected properties with flood plains. If a parcel had any acres in flood plain, the entire parcel was labeled as flood plain. "This creates a big problem if you would take an 80-acre farm that has only 3 acres that flood and 80 acres are debased," Brosamer said.

About 850 farmland parcels were affected. In assessments that sounds like a huge amount, but in tax dollars on farm ground it's not, she said. Once the errors were discovered, the option to rebill was weighed and determined not to be cost-effective.

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Farm assessments normally vary from one year to the next, and this year is the first to fully use the new mapping, land-use, farm productivity system, Brosamer said.

The 2007 assessments applied Bulletin 810 -- using certified rates per acre for farmland acreage.

This year, the 2008 assessment implemented the new productivity indexes, using soil mapping and the GIS land-use tables.

"It's been two years putting the two pieces together," Brosamer said. It really shouldn't have been; we really should have done it all at once, but the company putting together the parcel mapping couldn't get the project finished in that time, she explained.

Because it was a divided, two-year process, and with last year's land-use errors corrected, some farm bills went up more than the cap when the productivity indexes were applied. In total, the assessments were higher this year, she said.

The county has approximately 17,000 parcels. But if you take off the not-for-profit or nontaxable parcels, Brosamer said that it is closer to 16,000 billable parcels.

Photographers

Land productivity

In 2000, the Office of Research, College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, published two research bulletins that are also part of assessing farmland values today. Bulletin 810 and Bulletin 811 provide productivity index ratings for Illinois soils. The figures integrate 10-year crop yields and are recalculated each year. A productivity index rating of the soil typically can move only 10 percent.

The productivity index is a measure of crop production for a certain soil type potential under optimum conditions.

The crop, pasture and forestry yields, and productivity index ratings in Bulletin 810 are for the average level of management used by all farmers in Illinois in the 1990s.

Bulletin 811 provides crop yields and productivity indexes under an optimum level of management used by the top 16 percent of farmers in Illinois in the 1990s.

Previously all soil types and all the certified rates were added together and divided by the number of acres. Today, each soil type gets its own calculation and those are added together first.

Brosamer said that last year farmland assessed under Bulletin 810 was most affected by the application of the new soil layers. This year's farmland was most affected by the land use.

This was a big project, "importing every property in the county from GIS into our tax system," Brosamer said. "We'll never have that magnitude again."

In the future, the process would be much simpler and quicker, she said: "You put in the new farm rates; you import it; and you send the new notices out."

[By JAN YOUNGQUIST]

See Part 1 for other details of the property tax system:

For more information on Illinois soils and crop productivity, see the following:

Logan County GIS

The Internet mapping for Logan County can be found through the GIS page at http://www.co.logan.il.us/gis/. Choose "Internet Mapping" from the menu on the left side of the screen, and then select "Public Mapping." Directions can be found under the "Help" menu on the mapping site.

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