PORT ANGELES — Support for a tax to preserve farmland sprung up like a field of weeds Tuesday when Clallam County commissioners received more than 4,000 citizens’ signatures supporting the measure.
Although the county charter forbids citizens to petition a tax, the signatures spurred commissioners to all but promise to put the question on the Nov. 8 ballot.
The commission had considered a similar tax in 2002 but withdrew it in the face of stiff opposition.
On Tuesday, however, they scheduled a July 26 work session to hammer out language for a ballot proposal.
“I think it’s a debate that the people in this county need to have,” said Commissioner Steve Tharinger, D-Dungeness.
Commissioner Mike Chapman, R-Port Angeles, said he might be expected to oppose a new tax, but said he supported putting the question to the people.
He said that similar measures in what he called conservative communities throughout the West have added value to real estate next to conservation easements.
“The Realtors are marketing this, and they’re getting a jump in price,” Chapman said.
1 percent excise tax
Buyers would pay the 1-percent excise tax on real property transactions.
With an estimated $540 million in real estate sales in Clallam County in 2004, tax proponent Nash Huber said it would provide $5.4 million to buy easements on about 415 acres of farmland.
The fund, presumably supplemented by federal grants, would buy easements on farmland to keep it in agricultural use in perpetuity, said Huber, the premier organic farmer on the Olympic Peninsula.
Clallam County had set aside $250,000 in timber revenues for such purposes in 2002. By March, commissioners had spent it all, plus the interest it earned, $60,000 of new county money and $10,000 in citizens’ donations for an agricultural easement on 54 acres of dairy farmland in Agnew.
The local money was matched by $221,650 from the federal Farm and Ranchland Protection Program. Commissioners turned over the easement to the North Olympic Land Trust.
