Landowner’s charity plan lost in the county’s struggle to solve
tax-break troubles
San Martin – Artie Thorson’s horse arenas are the punchline to a joke – the kind that’s not funny because it’s true. Have you heard the one about the Santa Clara County Planning Office and how they issued Thorson a permit to build the arenas, but now won’t give her a permit to use them?
“It’s awful, it’s really frustrating,” Thorson said recently at her ranch on the edge of San Martin and Morgan Hill. “It’s like they don’t understand country living. They don’t understand agriculture. I just want to earn a little income. Enough to pay a hired hand.”
Thorson wants to use her arena to host cattle-roping events and donate it to community groups. But, like scores of other county landowners, she’s caught up in the county’s Williamson Act mess. Thorson is a victim of planners’ failure to enforce the farmland tax-break law and a renewed effort to erase years of mistakes, and may have to wait a decade to use the arenas she spent hundreds of thousands of dollars building.
“They’ve admitted the problems are their fault, and they’re doing all they can to rectify it,” Thorson said. “With everyone on their case, it must be hard.”
The Thorsons’ 20-acre ranch was in Williamson when they bought it. The couple never should have received the building permits because the property is in the Williamson Act and doesn’t meet the farming requirements of the law, which provides a generous property tax break in exchange for keeping land in agricultural use. Thorson and her late husband, Loren, used their ranch to breed horses – a use not allowed by the California Department of Conservation, which oversees Williamson.
The Thorsons built the arenas in 1998. Artie Thorson didn’t apply to use them for events until 2003, after her husband died and she needed a new source of income. Today, Thorson isn’t breeding horses, but keeps a handful on her ranch and raises a few head of Texas longhorns and she lives at the ranch.
Under the law, landowners who don’t meet farming requirements are not supposed to receive building permits for houses, barns or any other structure. For years, though, county planners treated horse breeders as farmers, didn’t ensure that act landowners were actually farming, and handed out countless illegal permits.
Now, three years after an audit by the DOC uncovered numerous problems in the county’s handling of the act, county officials are crafting new rules to enforce it. As many as 1,200 of the county’s 3,000 Williamson parcels may be evicted from the act.
If county planners decide Thorson Ranch no longer deserves act protections, she will have to non-renew her contract and wait 10 years for it to expire, or pay a fine equal to 12.5 percent of the ranch’s market value to cancel her contract immediately. The ranch’s Williamson value is about $336,000 – much lower than its true market value.
“I want to do the right things to be legal,” Thorson said, whose Williamson Act tax break is about $3,500. “It’s not the money. If they let me have a permit and opted me out that would be fine.”
That’s not likely to happen. The Williamson Act requires that land be farmed for the length of the contract, even as the tax evaporates in the first years of the non-renewal process. The county’s regulations have changed so much that Thorson’s horse breeding operation, which she needed to get her use permit when she first applied in 2003, could now actually prevent her from using her arenas. County Planner Mike Lopez said his office won’t make a determination until supervisors finalize the new rules.
“I’m not sure what her agricultural use can be justified as,” Lopez said. “She’s not raising cattle, she’s not raising crops. I don’t see anything that even puts her close.”
Thorson may have one other option. If the county decides to allow Williamson property owners to transfer their land to the less restrictive Open Space Easement Act, Thorson Ranch may qualify.
A ruling on Thorson’s case won’t be made until the spring. In the meantime, Thorson can’t use her arenas to earn a living or donate them to community groups such as the San Martin 4-H Club, which wants to use Thorson Ranch for riding lessons.
“We wouldn’t be able to afford to go elsewhere on a regular basis,” said Maureen Henningsen, a 4-H horse leader. “We ride their throughout the winter months and allow our kids to gain confidence and brush up on their horse skills, which they wouldn’t be able to do in the winter months.”
And Thorson wanted to donate her arenas for a July conference of the North American Riding for the Handicapped Association, but had to turn the group away.
“It’s a great thing for the community, but the community is not going to be able to use it,” she said.
