FARM REASSESSMENT SHOULD INCREASE TAXES ONLY SLIGHTLY

A recent reassessment of agricultural land should raise most farmers' taxes only a few dollars, and some may see a decrease, Cape Girardeau County Assessor Jerry Reynolds said.

Unlike residential and commercial real estate, agricultural land isn't assessed at market price; it's graded by productivity value on a scale of 1 to 8.

The University of Missouri created the grading scale. Grade 8, for example, is rocky land, grade 7 is steep hills and low gullies, and grade 6 is woodland. Grade 1 is the best land, with no limitations on what may be grown successfully on it using normal farming practices.

Last year, grade 1 land was assigned a production value of $894 an acre. This year, after a reassessment, the University of Missouri changed it to $985 an acre.

Agricultural land is assessed at 12 percent of that value.

The assessment for land in grades 1-3 and 6-8 went up, but it went down for grades 4 and 5.

Farmers with only a couple hundred acres only paid a few dollars more or less in taxes. Grade 1 land is rare in Cape Girardeau County, Reynolds said.

With tax bills mailed out over the past two weeks, some farmers had questions about their assessments. One complained that he wasn't informed in advance of the agricultural reassessment, but Reynolds said his office usually sends out letters only if the change in assessment is $500 or more.

"It would be a waste of the taxpayers' money to send out a letter to everyone whose taxes went up a dollar," he said.

The change also didn't break the state's Windfall Law, which states that taxing authorities must change their rate if a county's assessed valuation goes up more than 10 percent in a year.