A crackdown on fake farms in Scott County is about to wallop a whole bunch of people right in their most sensitive spot: their bank accounts.
In one extreme case -- a "shocker," in the words of County Auditor Cindy Geis -- annual property taxes will skyrocket from about $5,000 to nearly $40,000. In others, they will increase by $1,000 or more.
It is the latest phase in a lengthy campaign by the state and by counties to go after people who aren't really farming in any serious sense but are benefiting from generous tax breaks aimed at farmers.
Commissioner Tom Wolf, in whose mostly rural, southeast-corner district most of the affected properties are located, sat in disbelief on Tuesday in a conference room at the government center in Shakopee as example after example rolled by on a projection screen.
"People," he said, "are not going to be real happy."
Not all properties have been reviewed yet, Geis said, so it is hard to say exactly how many will be affected. She expects about 100 to be reclassified as something other than agriculture, and a "much larger" number to be removed from the Green Acres program, which suppresses property values to help real farmers close to metro areas stay in business even as land prices around them rise.
Scott County began going down this road a few years ago, when officials weeded out people who have fewer than 10 acres, a basic requirement in state law to be considered a farmer.
That move outraged the owners of many small acreages, such as people raising berries, organic vegetables or goats to sell to ethnic markets, and who consider themselves legitimate parts of the farm economy despite their small size.
