What Are They Waiting On?

LA Times:

The 2008 acquisition of Anheuser-Busch Cos. by Belgium's InBev, a deal worth $52 billion, created the largest beer company in the world.

It also created a potential boon for cash-strapped local governments in California — allowing them a rare chance to reassess the 1,022 acres owned by Anheuser-Busch in California and tax its 14 parcels at current market value.

It was a botched opportunity, records and interviews show. County governments took three years to reassess most of the parcels and still haven't finished the job, according to Times research and an analysis by the California Tax Reform Assn., a nonprofit based in Sacramento.

The landmark Budweiser brewery in Van Nuys, for instance, sits on land still being taxed at yesteryear's rates. The company pays about $18,000 in annual taxes for the 3 million square feet of land, or less than a penny a square foot.

If the property were assessed at current market value — 44 cents a square foot for the land — the tax bill for the land alone would top $1.3 million, said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Assn., basing that estimate on values of comparable properties. (He could not estimate the tax for the brewery itself.)

When asked why the property had not been reassessed, Los Angeles County Assessor John Noguez at first blamed the company for not notifying officials of the change in ownership.

For one, Proposition 13, the first of the anti-tax measures inacted in the country, is one of the reasons California is so screwed up.  How on earth can land for a giant operating brewery be taxed at $18,000 a year?  But even more important, why haven't the assessors finished their damn job?  With budgets completely strapped, I would think these guys would be watching very closely to see when they could reassess properties.  Getting back to the original point, the conservative loons sure put in a doozy of a system when they came up with that proposition.  Way to forever screw the government out of revenue.  And now the same type of process has come to the whole country.  So-called conservatives are really good at destroying what we have.  I always though that made them revolutionaries, not conservatives.  I guess an Orwellian language lives on.