Vulnerable pieces of land, which development is swallowing up in Hill Country, are now being protected by residents themselves.
Billy Calzada / Staff photographerDavid Prickett likes to say that the best part of his property is the dried up pit that used to be an active quarry. Forty-foot-high limestone walls surround a circular valley, where nature has taken back the land with shrubs and trees and prickly grasses. At sunset especially, Prickett will come out with his dog, Silly, and catch glimpses of wildlife as sunlight bounces off the old quarry rock.
Through the Texas Wildlife Management Program, landowners, like Prickett, can apply to save on their property taxes by managing native habitat and wildlife through projects and activities that support a healthy ecosystem. This made it possible for farmers and ranchers with an ag valuation — a special tax appraisal based on a property’s productivity value — to keep these savings even after they move on from agricultural operations.
For others who were never ranchers or farmers, like Prickett, they sponsored wildlife researchers and biologists for two years on the property to achieve the special valuation. It was the only way that Prickett could afford the land and his mission for a wildlife community preserve. Without the program, he would pay $8,000 more every year in taxes.
But that same year, the appraisal office reappraised the property for the first time in a decade, and the taxes jumped to $10,000. “Let’s say you own 100 acres in Bexar County and you figured that with the drought we had this past summer, it doesn’t make sense for me to run cattle anymore, too expensive, whatever else,” Siegmund said. “But you need so many cows per acre to get the tax valuation, but if you went to wildlife that would no longer apply.”
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