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With Many Suffering, Questions Raised About State’s Tax Breaks to Private River Oaks Country Club

Posted byHoumanitarian
River Oaks Country Club saves about $2M a year by getting its golf course’s market value of nearly $80M marked down to only $4.2M.

Dave Fehling, State Impact Texas
Certain tax exemptions will cost Texas $43.9 billion in 2013, according to a new report from the Texas Comptroller. Two state senators say it’s time to start reviewing those tax breaks.

“We have no earthly idea what they are, what they cost, who benefits from them,” Sen. Rodney Ellis told StateImpact.

Ellis, a Democrat from Houston, and John Carona, a Republican senator from Dallas, have filed a bill that would require such tax breaks be reviewed periodically to prove they continue to make fiscal sense. For example, breaks for drilling operations enacted years ago to encourage the new and costly horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing continue to drain money from state coffers for a method that today is neither new nor relatively as costly.

One break Sen. Ellis says could be targeted right now is one used by country clubs. Ellis will be the first to tell you what a lovely time one can have on the links of the exclusive River Oaks Country Club in Houston.

“I have a lot of good friends who are members there, have had the benefit of being able to play once or twice, would like to get invited again, may not get invited the day you run this story,” Ellis told StateImpact.

Two decades ago as a newly-elected legislator, Ellis saw a news article about how some local country clubs took advantage of a big break and avoided paying millions in property tax. Known as the Greenbelt Act, it gives enormous property tax discounts to owners of tracts of green space that is used only for recreation.

Ellis’s efforts to attack the statute back then went nowhere. Now, he’s giving it another try with a bill that would amend the act so that it only applies to such property that “is available to the public without a fee or for a nominal fee.”
(Read and listen to this full story at State Impact Texas)

See Also: Country Club Break Shows Perils of Messing with Taxes (Austin Statesman)

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