West Virginia Tax Reform - Excess Acreage Tax

The past president of West Liberty University, Robin Capehart served as chairman of the West Virginia Governor’s Commission on Fair Taxation from 1997 to 2000. As the commission’s chairman, Robin Capehart coauthored a 1999 study of West Virginia’s tax structure. The nearly 1,000-page report determined that the state’s tax system was burdened by an overly complicated and regressive structure that was still geared to an early-20th-century economy.

The Excess Acreage Tax is one of many specific examples outlined in the report of outdated tax measures that do not fit the economy and society of West Virginia today. Established in 1905, the Excess Acreage Tax imposes a one-time tax of $0.05 per acre on any corporation purchasing 10,000 acres or more of property in West Virginia. However, this does little to address the state’s historic economic problem of high rates of absentee land and mineral ownership. In 2012, West Virginia’s top 25 landowners owned about 18 percent of private land in the state, but none of the 10 largest owners had their headquarters in West Virginia.

The commission’s report recommended several changes to modernize the Excess Acreage Tax to reflect today's economic and fiscal situation . These recommendations included increasing the tax from $0.05 per acre to $0.50 per acre, lowering the property size threshold to 1,000 acres, making the tax annual rather than a one-time measure, and allowing taxed corporations to claim a credit against West Virginia’s severance tax. Based on data from the West Virginia Property Tax Department, adopting these changes could generate an estimated $1.7 million in annual tax revenue.