PRESIDIO — At last week’s City Council meeting, Presidio local Javier Hernandez stood up during open comment to ask a question: who owns the housing compound for local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees, and do they pay property taxes? 

Hernandez was concerned that the agency had struck a sweetheart deal with the city to get out of paying their fair share. Mayor John Ferguson insisted that was not the case. “There’s no conspiracy or anything,” he explained. “It’s just that the federal government owns that property, and it’s not taxable.” 

The Presidio CBP compound is located on the north side of town, abutting the Preventative Health Care Services clinic on one side and the Three Palms Inn across the street. The tidy subdivision contains 63 houses, built in two bursts in 1999 and 2013.

A spokesperson for CBP explained that the agency isn’t unique: other federally-owned property, like army bases, is also exempt from local taxation. Tax dollars collected from people who pay federal income taxes trickle down — directly or indirectly — to all federal programs, including CBP and the National Park Service, both of which own property in the tri-county area. 

Little did Hernandez know he’d touched a sore spot in city politics. The issue was last reported on by The Presidio International in October 2019, when city leaders aired their concerns about how much potential revenue the cash-strapped city could be losing.

At last week’s meeting, Ferguson said that not much had progressed over the past four years. “It’s a point of frustration for the city,” he said. “It’s nothing against [CBP], but our community serves the people who reside there through emergency services and our schools, but yet there’s no taxable income coming out of that subdivision into the city or the county.”

Ferguson said he’d like to see some kind of arrangement like the one between Brewster County and the National Park Service. To compensate for the property taxes that the massive 801,163-acre park would otherwise generate, the Department of the Interior cuts a check to the county on an annual basis through a program called Payment in Lieu of Taxation (PILT). “The law recognizes the financial impact of the inability of local governments to collect property taxes on federally owned land,” the agency’s website explains. “PILT payments are one of the ways the Federal Government can fulfill its role of being a good neighbor to local communities.” 

Last fiscal year, the Department of the Interior cut a check of over $1.4 million to the county. 

Big Bend National Park’s Chief of Interpretation Tom VandenBerg explained that people who live in the national park don’t pay property taxes — but they also don’t own any property. Their rent is determined by a federal algorithm, standard in parks across the country, that generates a fair price for housing based on costs in comparable communities like Alpine and Presidio. 

VandenBerg said that development close to the park — as with everywhere else in the Big Bend — had made home ownership nearly impossible for folks on a federal salary. “In the past, a fairly significant number of Big Bend employees rented or owned housing in Terlingua or Study Butte,” he said. “Today with most housing very expensive or converted to nightly rentals, that is not really an option.”

There is no equivalent PILT program for CBP, but Presidio city leadership insists they’ll keep looking into the issue. 

One of the first steps is to get tax-exempt properties in Presidio County appraised. Chief Appraiser Cynthia Ramirez said that her office had made progress on appraising properties for the Rio Grande Council of Governments, but it was slow-going. “We just haven’t had the manpower,” she said. 

She said that taking the time to appraise properties — even if they can’t generate revenue for the county or city — still helps landowners by providing a definitive value that tax-exempt entities can use for insurance purposes.

Mayor Ferguson said he planned to reignite conversations to explore Presidio’s options. “We’ve been talking about this for a long time,” he said.