Bill Axing Land-Use Tax Penalty Is OKd : Carlsbad Flower Grower Can Swap Land to Allow Expansion of Car Dealerships

Gov. George Deukmejian was sent a bill Wednesday that will lift a development ban on 37 acres owned by a flower grower near “Carlsbad Car Country.”

The bill, which won final legislative approval Wednesday on a 78-0 vote in the Assembly, will allow the complex of new car dealerships to expand onto land that otherwise would be locked in a tax-sheltered agricultural preserve for nine years.

Without the bill by Assemblyman Robert Frazee (R-Carlsbad), flower grower Paul Ecke would have to pay about $139,000 in tax penalties to end a contractual ban on developing his property.

But the bill will allow Ecke to swap the land being taken out of the preserve for 37 nearby acres that Frazee said have greater “productive quality.” It would be “like double taxation,” Frazee said, if Ecke was forced to pay a tax penalty.

So far, Deukmejian has taken no position on the bill, which is strongly supported by Carlsbad city officials and the San Diego County Farm Bureau, according to Kevin Brett, the governor’s deputy press secretary.

Under the state’s Williamson Act, landowners are taxed at a lower rate if they agree to keep their property as open space, or in agricultural production, at least 10 years. Each year, the contract is automatically renewed unless the landowner gives notice that he will end the contract nine years later.

Currently, the only immediate way to remove land from an agricultural preserve is to pay the taxes that would have been assessed had the contract never been written.

Frazee’s bill, which allows for swapping of land, affects only coastal zone property in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties. Some say the bill will have little application outside Carlsbad, one of the few coastal cities that ever entered Williamson Act contracts with landowners.

In December, 1975, Ecke’s flower-growing company entered into the contract covering more than 350 acres. Ecke has allowed the contract to be renewed since then.

Partly because Frazee was mayor of Carlsbad when the contract with Ecke was signed, he ran into minimal resistance to his proposal in the Legislature. The bill ran into its first serious opposition in July in the Senate Local Government Committee, where opponents argued that it gave Ecke an inappropriately easy way out of the agricultural preserve contract.

The Assembly initially passed the bill, by 78-0, in June. Earlier this week, the Senate passed it 22-0, one more than the minimum votes needed.

On Wednesday, the Assembly agreed to minor Senate changes and sent the bill to the governor.