At the Drive Shack golfing center in Lake Nona, golf balls struck from the three-story driving range roll to a stop not far from a few small cows grazing on a patch of pastureland and palmetto scrub.
Those cows saved a little more than $18,000 in taxes last year for the property’s owner: An affiliate of The Tavistock Group, the developer building Orlando’s fast-growing Lake Nona community.
The Drive Shack cows are just one tiny piece of a much larger strategy that saved Tavistock about $10 million in property taxes last year — thanks to an agricultural tax break created 60 years ago to save Florida farmers from urban sprawl. Records show Tavistock companies claimed the farming tax break last year on more half a billion dollars’ worth of property in Orange County, in some cases slashing the taxable value of that land by 99.9 percent.
Tavistock’s 2020 tax savings were about the same amount of money as the city of Orlando has budgeted this year for its entire Housing and Community Development Department.
Tavistock — the private investment firm founded by billionaire Joe Lewis — appears to be the biggest saver in Orange County and one of the largest savers in all of Florida under what’s known as Florida’s “greenbelt” law, according to an Orlando Sentinel analysis of statewide property tax rolls.
“We call it the two-cow tax break,” said Orange County Commissioner Nicole Wilson, an environmental-law attorney.
Fiercely guarded by lobbyists for both the agriculture and real-estate industries, the greenbelt law provides for lower tax assessments on property used for agriculture — but the law is so loosely written that two or three cattle grazing on a few acres of vacant city land can qualify. Wilson and others say the tax break does as much today to subsidize developers as it does to help farmers.
“It’s a tax loophole,” she said.
Representatives for Tavistock declined to comment for this story. But the Lake Nona developer has plenty of company, according to the Sentinel’s analysis, which identified some of the tax break’s biggest beneficiaries by reviewing county-by-county property-tax rolls, crosschecking landowners with state corporate records, and estimating the tax savings based on the amount of the assessment reduction and the local tax rate.
For instance, entities connected to Mattamy Homes, one of North America’s largest privately held homebuilders, saved an estimated $7.1 million last year. Walt Disney World and various Disney subsidiaries saved approximately $5.8 million. And companies controlled by the Davis family of Jacksonville — the founders of the Winn-Dixie grocery chain who are now some of the biggest housing developers in northeast Florida — saved an estimated $5.7 million.
Companies linked to the developers of Lakewood Ranch in southwest Florida saved an estimated $4.6 million. Utility giant Florida Power & Light saved an estimated $3.8 million. The Graham Companies — the developer of the city of Miami Lakes whose owners include former Florida Gov. and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham — saved an estimated $3.4 million in Miami-Dade County.
Many more non-farming companies, from Anheuser-Busch to Walmart, saved smaller amounts. The developer of the American Dream mega mall in Miami shaved nearly $400,000 from the 2020 tax bill for its land at the junction of I-75 and Florida’s Turnpike. SeaWorld Orlando trimmed nearly $90,000 from the bill for 16 acres of “timberlands” it owns on International Drive that is literally across the street from the Kraken roller coaster.
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