State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg

I called Colorado State Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg to ask him to explain what I will describe as nothing short of government terrorism in Colorado involving innocent farmers and ranchers. "I am a farmer and rancher up by Sterling, but I am indeed a State Sen. You know the Gentz story, I talked to a brokenhearted Julie Gentz and quite frankly I am dumbfounded. How do we explain that? The truth is we cannot explain it. There is no explanation nor any excuse. This is not a legislative issue, this is a department of revenue issue in which they arbitrarily decided several years later not to honor the tax credits that were filed for and here's what happened. Understand that I have carried a couple of bills to try and fix this. The story is that back in early 2000, former speaker of the house Lois Bradley ran a bill to create conservation easements to try and ag land in ag use. The bill said for these conservation easements, if you do AB and C, for that value we will give you tax credits of XY and Z. What happened is that these farmers and ranchers did A B and C, got their tax credit, at these appraisals just like was asked by certified tax appraisers and then the Department of revenue arbitrarily said, we disagree with those even though we don't have an appraiser on staff, we don't like these appraisals so we are going to reject these tax credits.