Nobody pays taxes on wet sand
(Wells, Maine) Wells property owners, who claim to own Moody Beach to the low water mark, only pay taxes on the upland portion of their property, according to evidence that nullifies a reflexive argument some coastal property owners often make: that paying taxes gives them the right to kick people off the beach.
While litigating a case now in Maine Superior Court, attorneys examined property tax records during the discovery phase of the lawsuit. One such record showed land that fronted Moody Beach measured 7,261 square feet in area. Using a simple online measuring tool and a satellite photo, researchers measured the lot only from the street to the seawall, the portion of the lot above the mean high tide. They found roughly the same number, 7,233 square feet. (3-page PDF attached.)
“These property owners are claiming to own all the way to the low tide line,” said one of the attorneys, Benjamin Ford. “But if you measure the land all the way to the low tide line, it would be three or four times the size listed in the tax records. We then examined multiple properties and saw the same result up and down the beach. These records show that these individuals do not pay a dime in taxes to the Town of Wells for what they claim to be a private beach.”
Ford said just to make sure, his researchers also investigated whether the price of the land per square foot was higher because the land was situated on the claimed private beach. They compared the price per square foot of the Moody Beach lot with lots of a similar size on Wells Beach, a public beach. The two prices were nearly identical.
“If they actually paid taxes on the land they claimed to own, their tax bill should be three or four time higher than it is today. The facts on the ground add moral support to the legal arguments we are making in court: the intertidal land belongs to the people of the State of Maine, it always has, and it always will.
“There is a citizen march and rally tomorrow morning at Moody Beach. What we know for sure is that they’ll be marching on land for which not a single person pays a single penny in taxes to the town of Wells,” Ford said.