Environment, Agriculture & Natural Resources Committee - Regular Meeting

We're gonna call the Land Conservation Committee to order. And then Amy, can you call the roll?

Sure. Supervisor Downing.

Is here.

Supervisor Doolin? Supervisor Chawla?

Chawla here.

Supervisor Smith? Supervisor Peters? Here. Supervisor Maren?

Maren here.

Supervisor Baruchic?

Here. Alright. We have quorum. Okay. Perfect. Round to b. Consideration of minutes. I'll entertain a motion.

Move through.

Okay. Moved by Peters. Any committee member discussion or question? I'm seeing any. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed? Abstentions? All right. That passes. C, fund transfers, none. D, referrals, none. Next, have e, items requiring committee action. We have 2025 Act three twenty two, the wildlife damage claims. I'll entertain a motion on this. Move approval. K. Moved by Peters. And I I think the floor is yours. Are you are you on the wildlife claims? Yep. Okay. Perfect. So

for 2025, Dane County, we had one damage claim for deer over in Springdale Township. Mister Magnuson farms corn and beans. The appraisal this year was $4,938.25. After the DNR $500 deductible, it comes out to $4,438.25. Pretty much standard rate for his claim over the years.

He did meet his harvest objectives for ag tag deer and no, formal complaints from any hunters trying to access. So no no issues on ours or the DNR's end. And, yeah, just as a reminder, again, it's not county money. It's DNR money being pushed through the county's approval for it.

Alright. That sounds good. Do we have any committee member questions or discussion?

Can I ask a quick question? And I know there's no such thing as a stupid question, but this will be to you guys. What is meant by a deer enrollment or a goose enrollment? It that's this is kind of cracking me up, but I assume it's just the damage caused by that particular animal. Or

Yeah. So the DNR damage program covers a couple different species, deer, goose, turkeys, bears, elk. And if there's ever a crane season, cranes would be on there as well, but there's not. So, yeah, in Dane County, we had 12 enrollments from farmers that had deer damage, two for goose damages, and then we actually had a bear get into an apiary in Mount Horne. So he signed up for the damage program for a bear enrollment.

Thank you so much.

Downing would like to move this one.

Alright. So moved by Downing. Actually, did we already move it? I think we Why don't we just change that? Switch that. Yeah. Yeah. Let's switch that to downing. I have one question. Do we ever ever have, like, beaver damage? Do beavers ever, like, cause damage to farms around here?

They do. That's not something that we cover in the damage program. We do offer nuisance trapping and things, but that would be as a private contract deal. But yeah. Absolutely. We have I trapped beavers in the forest this year in the city because they were causing damage to a couple ponds. Mhmm. And then, yeah, we do run into farmers that have damage and flooded crops, and the beavers actually chew to the cornstalks and make dams out of that too. So yeah. Absolutely.

I've been watching a lot of beaver documentaries lately.

Oh, sure.

Conservationist versus farmers and how everyone can live in harmony, land restoration, and, like, the Washington Rivers. Anyways, and People love them or hate them. Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Even on our staff, it's a controversial topic. Ah, okay. Both sides. I I like the Beavers. As long as, like, they're getting along with everyone and they're in their good areas, living in harmony. Absolutely. We

have one question.

And then supervisor.

Yeah. Thanks. Just curious. Same question about, do they cause damage, sandhill cranes.

Yeah. So we get a lot of, not a lot. Dane County does receive some sandhill crane damage reports. And in that case, the farmers can apply for a permit through the Fish and Wildlife Service. It's a $100 permit per year and they have to they have to treat their seeds with Avapel, which is the the crane deterrent.

If they do all that, then they are eligible for shooting permits as well. I think usually farmers get about five because they work well with if you leave dead ones out in the field as you're supposed to do under this permit, more cranes usually get scared by that, and then they end up leaving anyway as well. Effigy, that's the word. They they do well with effigies. So, yeah, there's not a lot of Dane County permits, but there's definitely a few. And if there ever was a hunting season, they would be included into the the damage program, and we'd probably see a lot more claims.

Thank you.

Thanks, supervisor Boruchik. Okay. Not seeing anyone else here. Go ahead and call the question. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Okay. That passes. And then do we have you for another item? Or That should be it. Do you need a signature on something?

Yeah. I just need the claim form signature. Don't know.

So can I I can Yeah? We can have 85. Alright. Cool. Alright. Yeah.

What is Chase Ave?

122. 26. Alright. Excellent. Yeah.

That's it. Alright.

Thank you very much, everybody.

Alright. Thanks. Have a good one. Thanks for coming. Okay. Up next, we're on to f presentations. Amy, I think you're up with the Farmland Preservation Program presentation, or is that somebody else?

That's me. Okay. Yeah. So we're gonna talk about the potential of developing a fee schedule for farmland preservation implementation. So that's kind of the overview of what we're gonna talk about.

We're gonna at least start with what is farmland preservation. So if you're not familiar with the farmland preservation program, it's a Wisconsin tax credit program that encourages maintenance and preserving of farmland in the state. So it's a state tax credit that landowners who are eligible and meet a variety of eligibility requirements can claim on their taxes to get a credit. Eligibility includes they have to own the land in the year that they're claiming. The land has to be located in a certified farmland preservation zoning district or a farmland preservation agreement, which is directly with Department of Agriculture.

The zoning districts, that's our farmland preservation zoning plan, that planning and development creates once every ten years. So they have that overlay. For townships that have opted out of county zoning, it's up to them individually to get their zoning approved by the state for eligibility. They have to be a Wisconsin resident for the entire taxable year. They can't claim a homestead credit or veterans or surviving spouse credits.

They have to meet state soil and water conservation standards. And then they have to have gross revenue income that meets various capacities. The two areas we're most concerned with when we're talking about Land and Water Resources Department and the work that we do is whether or not they have the zoning eligibility or have an agreement, and do they meet the soil and water conservation standards? So that's those are the two areas that we kind of interject into the program. We don't verify, did they, you know, make the income requirements, were they a resident?

We don't verify those things. So what is the tax credit? It's a $10 per acre credit for eligible acreage. So if they have, for example, a 40 acre parcel and 20 acres is cropland and 20 acres is forest, still the whole 40 acres is eligible as long as it's zoned agriculture or if it's under an agreement with the state. If they have both an agreement and zoning, they can get $12.50 an acre for a credit.

And just to kinda give you an idea of the reporting from Department of Revenue for 2024, we had 956 claims in the county for farmland preservation, and that was over $1,700,000 in credits that came to those landowners and covered about 177,000 acres in the county. DATCap, Department of Ag, and Department of Revenue both play a role in this program. So Department of Agriculture mostly tracks all of the participants that the counties are tracking. So each year, we have to send Department of Ag a list of all the participants that we know of that have what we call a certificate of compliance to Department of Ag. They compile a master spreadsheet and send that to Department of Revenue.

And then Department of Revenue reviews and approves all the tax stuff. So that's that role. And then as far as funding goes, just so you understand where the funding comes for this program, Planning and development can actually apply for grants once every ten years to implement and update the farmland preservation zoning program. We receive our soil and water resource management grant each year, which includes a staffing component of it. But that's to implement our full land and water resource management plan.

So farmland preservation is only one component of that. And you'll see later the amount of work that's associated with farmland preservation isn't quite covered by the grants that we get from DATCap. I did see a question, I think. I can pause.

Yeah. That was me. I'm just wondering because you cut out a couple times. I heard most of what you said, but I'm kinda curious. Is anyone else having audio problems, especially those online? No? Okay. Well, it's fine now. So

Okay. Sorry to interrupt.

No. That's okay. I wanted to catch your question if you had one. I just moved the speaker a little closer, I think. So what is the county's role in all of this?

That's kind of, you know, the workload associated with this. So our job is to issue basically the certificates of compliance that the landowner needs to show on their taxes that they're in compliance with the state soil and water conservation standards and zoning eligibility. So every landowner that wants to claim this tax credit has to have this certificate, which has a unique ID number that they include on their taxes. We maintain all of that. So we maintain all of the records.

If they change their land ownership, so if they buy more land, if they sell land, if they convert from individual landowners to a trust, or things like that, All of those changes go through us, because the certificate has to match the landowner as it is on your tax bill, because it's all part of taxes. We also do all the review of zoning eligibility, which in Dane County is easy if they're through Dane County Planning and Zoning. With the zoning, it gets a little more challenging if it's a township that opted out, because now we have to work with that township to try to figure out the zoning. We issue any new certificates for new landowners, which means we have to conduct a walkover and make sure they're compliant with all of the standards, and then issue them that unique ID. And then we also do all of the work associated with non compliance.

So if they're not in compliance, we have to issue either a non compliance notice. We have to work with them if they wanna get back into compliance. And a lot of reasons for non compliance. One, Department of Ag includes a lot of things as non compliant. Zoning ineligibility is one, which they're not really not in compliant, just don't meet the eligibility.

The soil water conservation standards is really where we're at. And then landowners also have the opportunity to voluntarily waive their right to accept the program if they want to. We don't get those very often. But those would all be noncompliance issues that we have to monitor, track, and implement. So the soil and water conservation standards, in order to determine compliance, we have to do a site visit once every four years.

So we have to be on farm if they have livestock, reviewing their farmstead to ensure that they're meeting their manure management requirements, their nutrient management requirements, and any other issues or things that may result in problems at the farmstead site or on their cropland. And then if they are out of compliance, we have to then work with them to get them back into compliance if they want to continue in the program. So that is sometimes doing our planning work that we do, engineering work. Sometimes we still offer cost share funding to help them come back into compliance, but all of that work is stuff that the county does. So when we estimate kind of the workload associated with this program, we issue about 100 certificates, new certificates, and update certificates each year, at least 100.

Now that it's tax season, that number is going to go up, because people are talking with their tax preparers, and their tax preparers are like, your certificate doesn't match your land ownership. Or what about these acres that you bought? So right now is when we're going to start getting quite a few calls. And each one of those paperwork updates take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour, depending on the complexity of what's happening with the land ownership. Again, we conduct status reviews.

We conduct around two fifty to 300 status reviews each year. And those take about ten hours each, at a minimum, depending on the complexity of the site. So if it's a really large farm, it might take even longer than that to walk over it, to check all the things, to review their nutrient management plan. If it's a smaller farm, it's a little bit less. We have a lot of participants who are land owners, but not the operator of the farm.

They rent their land to a farm. So we spend a lot of time tracking down who is your operator, and then trying to tie up match up, not tie up, but match up renters and operators and landowners, and trying to get all that matching and to meld together. Other work that we do includes mailings. We do a lot of education and answering questions, particularly during tax season. All of the noncompliance issues we work through.

There's a lot of data management, and then we get a lot of questions from tax preparers as well. Even though we don't provide tax advice at all, the tax preparers may have questions, and they contact us. And I would say that works out to be somewhere around a thousand hours at a minimum. Just all the little phone calls throughout the year, and the time that it takes. One of the areas that we've kind of reduced our workload to try to save ourselves a little bit of time and energy is we no longer offer self certifications.

So the program does allow the county to say, on an annual basis, basically, send a letter to the participant and say, send us back this postcard, and you sign off that you're in compliance. We used to do that, and what we found is that people just sign off that they're in compliance without knowing what they're signing for, or they wouldn't return the form at all. And by not returning that form, they're in noncompliance, which just generated a lot of paperwork. And so we were spending a lot more time on paperwork than we were actually working with the landowners or going out on their farms and seeing the land, which is a really good way for us to get projects and identify conservation resource concerns on farms. So we switched our focus to do the once every four year status reviews as opposed to self certifications.

But from a workload standpoint, this is at least two FTEs worth of work, if not more, depending on the complexity of issues that we come up with. So when we're talking about fees, one of the things I wanted to check was how do we compare to our neighbors? So this map is actually Department of Revenue's map of claimants, people who claimed farmland preservation, in 2024, I believe. And you can see Dane County is dark blue. We have the highest number of participants in the state, period.

There's no other county that has nearly as many participants as we do. But I still wanted to kinda see. You can see the surrounding counties, there's some numbers there. So I wanted to see what neighboring counties were doing. So we're

Proportionally, like, how do we like, population wise, do is this this is the this is just, like, raw numbers, but does it take into account, like, that we're one of the bigger agricultural producing states?

So Marathon County is usually the county that I reference us to because we're similar in size for ag acreage. And if you look at Marathon County kind of in the center of the state, they have far less participation. And that could be because they don't have zoning. So that could be one issue, is that not all of their townships have zoning or eligibility or meet some of those other eligibility criteria. In Dane County, we do have zoning, which makes people eligible.

And then we have that farmland preservation plan that identifies their zoning. But we've got nearly 500,000 acres of cropland that could potentially be eligible if it falls in the zoning plan. So if you look at the surrounding counties, I kinda looked, I checked with Greene County. They have 18 certificates, and they don't charge any fees. But they only have 18.

They don't have county zoning. They don't really administer much with the program. Sauk County has around three thirty certificates. They also don't charge any fees. And then if you throw us in there, we're about $9.50, give or take, on any given day.

And we also have no fees. If we reset this and we look at Dodge County, they have about five ninety certificates, and they do an annual fee of $25 per year for a participant. Rock County does something kinda similar. It's again an annual payment, but they kinda weight it based on the number of acres that are in the program. So it's a $15 plus 50¢ annually per acre.

So if you have 40 acres, your bill is gonna be a little less than somebody who has 200 acres in the program. But the workload is different for that. 40 acres is easier to check than 200 acres. Iowa County has about six eighty certificates. They have a $25 annual fee for the program, again for that self certification.

And then if they're late, they charge a $30 fee on top of that. And then the two counties that were a little more complicated in their fee structures, Columbia County has a number of fees. They have $25 for anybody who's a new enrollment. So if you wanna get into the program, you have to pay $25 If anytime you wanna update your certificate, they charge you $25 And then they have a $10 late fee for those annual certifications. And then finally, Jefferson has even more.

They have a $35 annual fee with a $35 late fee. If you have a notice of noncompliance and you want to get back into the program, they charge you $100 If you're a new enrollee, they charge $35 And if you need a new certificate because you lost yours, they charge $5 So all of the surrounding counties with kind of similar ish workload charge except for a green and SOC. So one of the things we're kinda looking at from a proposal standpoint is considering a fee structure for Dane County. And we wouldn't make this effective until maybe '27. And one of the things we were looking at as I talked to counties statewide, is some counties do that annual certification, so it's an annual fee.

Some counties only do a fee for the status review, when we're actually physically on the farm. And so we were looking at the status reviews as a way to enter this. And the thought would be maybe a $50 fee plus $0.50 per acre once every four years as opposed to an annual fee. We wouldn't propose any certificate update or change fees, no late fees at this time, or no fees for cancellations. So if you look at the math at the bottom, if we have about nine fifty certificates, roughly $174,000 that would bring in about $34,000 annually in fees.

And those funds can be used to help offset program implementation, mailing, outreach materials, as well as the software that we use to track this has an annual maintenance fee of nearly $10,000 And then the table here is just kind of a breakdown of the size of farms. So you can see one to 25 acre farms, we've got about 16 of those participating, which I'd be curious if they're actually taking the tax credit and meet some of the income eligibility requirements. That's the one disconnect in the program, is we don't know who, because it's private information, it's tax information, we don't know who actually takes the credit. We know who wants a certificate, but we don't know if they're actually on the back end taking the credit.

What do you get for a certificate not like, what's the point of having a certificate if you don't take the tax credit?

I don't know. Okay. That's a good question. And that's a workload thing for us because we still have to do the compliance even if you're not taking the tax credit.

Okay.

And so I'm thinking a fee there might be like, oh, well, if you're not taking the tax credit, we can take you off of our list and not have to do all of this work when you're not actually taking the credit. And then you can kinda see the breakdown. We have a lot of farms, around 400 or so, that fall within the 50 to 150 acres. 150 to 300, there's a lot of farms in that category. And then it tails off, and we only have about six farms that are over 1,000 acres.

So one of the things we're thinking about is how would this process workflow in our daily work? So each year, at about this time, we start to identify who's gonna be selected for status reviews on the four year cycle. We send notices to them, and what we would do is send a notice and an invoice. And when we receive the fee, the proposal would be, we schedule your status review. And then we would conduct the status review. I've talked with other counties. That's kind of how they've implemented this as well.

And how do they pay?

Like, what are

their paying options?

Their paying options depends on the county. I mean, for here, I think we would look at they could pay by check or we would come up with an electronic method of paying as well through our, you know, like our park permits or things like And then the question came up, well, what happens if we don't receive a payment? We would issue them a final notice. And if we don't get a payment, we would not conduct their status review. And then we would issue them the notice of noncompliance, because they're not allowing us access to the property.

Which is currently an issue that we run into sometimes, because we send all these letters telling people, come on, we need to come out. We call them. We do a lot of tracking of this, and don't always get responses until we send a notice of non compliance. And then they're like, oh, I didn't know. And we've been trying to contact you for six months.

So just for some math examples, if you have a 40 acre farm, you get about $400 per year in tax credits, so about $1,600 over four years. What the fee proposal would be is a $70 fee once every four years. For a 300 acre farm, you're getting about $3,000 per year in tax credits, which is about 12,000 over the four years. And that would be about a $200 fee once every four years. So the recommendation, and this is just a presentation today to introduce the topic.

At the February meeting, the plan would be to bring our fee schedule that the committee approves for permitting and things like that. And then at that time, review and decide what kind of what if we want a fee schedule, and then what that fee schedule might look like. And then based on that committee meeting, we would then do our education and outreach through the rest of the year of '26.

I have a number of questions.

Alright.

So I'll just ask a few of them. And then if other folks have questions, you can raise your hand or jump in. I'm not looking at the chat just to just as a FYI. So what are the cost of administrating these fees? Like, looked at there was, like, a thousand hours or some step time, like, three FTEs. Is this gonna add additional workload to the administration, or is it nominal?

I it will add some workload to it, but I still I don't think I think in the end, we will still be more offsetting those costs. Mhmm. You know, because we still have to send them a letter no matter what. So if we're sending them a bill with a letter

Yeah.

That's not a lot of extra work. We're already sending them the letter. We're already doing a status review. What this does is probably tightens up our list of participants a little bit more and helps us recoup some of the costs associated with it. It's obviously not gonna recoup every everything that we put into the program, but would help offset some of the other costs, like the software costs.

Okay. And then since this is this is new to the committee, what would be the latest date if we were to to to implement a fee structure? What's the latest date we could do it in 2026 for 2027?

Good question. You know, the goal so we're gonna be sending our letters for status reviews for 2026 here probably in March. And it'd be nice to be able to include information about a potential fee change for 2027, but we probably could do that. I would say if you gave us six months, so Yeah. We would want enough time to still be able to educate the participants.

Yeah. I mean, that sounds sensible because I think folks would wanna digest this and kinda talk to their stakeholders and

Mhmm.

And get a little bit more information. And then I just have two quick comments that I'll throw in. One is, does it make any sense to have, like, different cost structures for folks who are opted in and out of zoning? Because it seems if you opted out of Dane County zoning, there's more work to be done.

It'd be more either way, it would be more work, I guess. Because then we would have to what we run into is we have people who own land in and out of a township that opted out.

Okay. Yeah.

So then we would have to try to parse out what part of your land

That's not worth it?

No. Okay. Mm-mm. Okay.

And then just one suggestion. I think we're gonna be looking at our lobbying agenda. And when we look at it, we might wanna look at if the farmland preservation program can give some kind of administrative support to counties since the counties are in charge of doing, like, the heavy lifting. Maybe that's something we could add there. I'm not sure if we even want to bring that up because then they might add a penalty for cap he's administrating it, or they might look at some of the metrics and who knows how they would feel about participant levels in different locations. But something to potentially talk about when we get to that point.

And that is something we have talked to the state about, and the state department of ag has tried to look at ways that they could do that, just nothing has come through the legislature.

Okay. Gonna take a look here and see if we have any other folks who wanna jump in. Questions? It looks like supervisor Maren, you wanna go ahead?

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Amy. I think you already mentioned this, but I just wanna make sure that I'm clear on it. So if a if a landowner leases their land to a farmer or leases their land for other purposes, they're still eligible for that for that tax credit even if they're not farming, I guess, the land themselves?

Correct. Okay. Yep. Yep. So a lot of our participants are landowners who do not operate their land.

Notting with the question.

Go ahead, supervisor, darling.

Well, thanks. Well, just, reviewing a little bit. A thousand claims, approximately a thousand claims in Dane County amount to a million $722,000. And so if you if you take $34,000 of revenue away from that, it's still a pretty good chunk of money. And if you divide $34,000 by a thousand claims, the average per client is is not really too onerous, I'm thinking.

But I'm wondering, does the state offer us any money to run this program?

Not directly, no.

Not What does that mean?

Well, like I said, planning and zoning can apply for a grant when it's time to update our zoning our land preservation zoning plan. So they can apply for up to $30,000 to update the the zoning. And then we receive a soil and water resource management grant from the state that is to implement our land and water resource management plan. And one of the many tasks in that land and water resource management plan is to implement farmland preservation. But it does not directly relate to implementation. Every county in the state gets one of those grants, whether they have farmland preservation or not.

And how much is that grant?

This year, I believe it fluctuates a little bit. I believe this year it's around 300,000.

Okay. Alright. Thank you.

Supervisor Downing? I'm not seeing anyone else on the queue. This was just a presentation, so we'll leave it at that. And then you can work with the committee chair scheduling follow-up committee discussions as well. But thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Sure. Up next, Rhonda, g reports the committee. And speaking of farmland preservation, looks like we're gonna see the certificates issued, the notice of noncompliance, and the cancellations here. So, yeah, it's all fresh in our mind.

So the first attachment that's here is all of the notices of noncompliance that were issued for tax year 2025. You can see on here a lot of them are due to ineligibility for zoning, meaning the zoning changed. And that zoning could have changed because the landowner chose, you know, to change it or things like that. There's a few waivers of rights where the landowner no longer wants to participate. And then we have a couple in here where they didn't submit a nutrient management plan, which is required as part of the program.

Or they didn't permit inspection. So if they refuse to allow us to check those soil and water conservation standards, we can't verify that they're in compliance. So those were the ones that received notices of noncompliance. You'll see one is crossed off. We had originally noted that they had failed to submit a nutrient management plan, but you'll see in the next report that we canceled that because they did submit a nutrient management plan, but the land ownership name was not listed properly in the plan.

So we couldn't make that crosswalk of your lands in so and so's nutrient management plan. But they called us and we got that corrected. Again, it's one of those things where we probably called them two or three times and sent them two or three letters and they never responded. And then we sent the notice of non compliance and they called right away. And then the last report are all the certificates that we issued in 2025.

There are four pages of these. So these are all of the certificates that are either new, and they can go back, just as a, to complicate the program more, they can go back four tax years, too. So we have to look at this. And if they say, well, back in 2023, I wanna claim the tax credit because I haven't done my 2023 taxes yet or something, we have to go backwards in time as well, which also complicates things.

So if you do that, you have to produce that nutrient management plan from that. You're okay.

Yep. And that's even more like that's where it comes down to how long does it take to issue a certificate? It depends. Because we may have to track down a lot of information. But this list here, it's four pages of all the folks.

We include the township that they're located, then the number of acres that we do. And and some of them, like like we were talking, are are broken up where the landowner has land in multiple townships. So I think we did let's see if we get to the bottom of this without making you sick. 71 this this past year. So it it fluctuates a little bit. But Great. Those are the reports.

Thank you for reporting that. And it looks like we have some DATcap extensions and county extensions. Why don't we go to the DATcap extensions next?

Sure. This is just, if you remember in December, we presented the draft. This is just the final. This is what we submitted to DATcap. Oh, it's tiny.

These are the final ones. This one did not change. So it's just presenting the final one.

K. Great.

And then county programs, it's the same thing. We present the draft in December.

Okay.

And then this is the final. And again, there were just some minor minor ones that ended up getting paid before the end of the year. Alright. But it's for each of the programs that we implement.

K. Alright. Do we have any questions on any of the reports? K. Alright. We'll go on to h, future meeting items and dates. Our next LCC meeting, Thursday, February 26, or call of the chair. And we have aye, public comment on items not on the agenda. None. J, such other business is allowed by law. We have none. And I'll entertain a motion to adjourn. Moved. Moved by Peters. All those in favor of adjournment, say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Okay. LCC is adjourned.