Real estate investor Michael Lightman hopes to cash in on a lush woods located in the midst of top-dollar real estate development in east Shelby County, and taxpayers are subsidizing his gambit.Lightman bought the 27-acre stand of long-needle pine, oak and maple in 1998 as FedEx opened its colossal technology campus, the FedEx World Tech Center, just across Bailey Station Road in Collierville. He's attempting to sell the property for $7 million and more than double his investment. Yet, Lightman paid just $347 in county property taxes on the land last year — less than the bill on a $35,000 home — after Shelby County Assessor of Property Cheyenne Johnson enrolled it in a widely exploited, poorly regulated state farmland protection program. County records say Lightman receives a $53,000-a-year property tax discount on the tract though it's advertised for sale as a prime development site for a hotel or office building. "Taxes will eat you alive on a property like that,'' he said. "You've got to try to find some help.''
An investigation by The Commercial Appeal and its sister publication, the Knoxville New-Sentinel, found Lightman and many other savvy property owners across Tennessee are reaping dramatic tax savings — often paying pennies on the dollar — because a 1976 law to prevent farmers from being taxed off their land is full of loopholes and timidly enforced by many of the state's 95 assessors.The newspaper found more than half of the land in Tennessee — nearly 15 million acres — is enrolled in the program protecting farmland, the vast majority in rural counties where agriculture is the dominant industry. Yet, in urban areas the tax rolls evidence significant abuse — from wealthy estate owners living in mansions on huge tracts to real estate developers escaping much of their annual tax bills by declaring a woods a timber preserve, a manicured lawn a pasture, a future subdivision a farm. And, by all accounts, it's legal.
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