Request By:
Mr. Drewie Muncy
Martin County Attorney
Box 411
Inez, Kentucky 41224
Opinion
Opinion By: Steven L. Beshear, Attorney General; By: William P. Sturm, Assistant Attorney General
Your recent letter to the Attorney General requests an opinion concerning the manner in which the homestead exemption from real property taxes for taxpayers 65 years of age or older should be applied. In your letter you set forth the problem in the following hypothetical situation:
"John Doe is sixty-five years of age and is the owner of Blackacre (20 acres more or less) which he uses as a permanent residence. Blackacre has a fair market value of $20,000. Blackacre has a small house, a small garden area and a yard which comprises about one acre of level land. The remaining 19 acres is hill land."
The question posed in your letter is as follows:
"Is the property valuation administrator required to make an evaluation of the whole 20 acre tract under the 'contiguous real property clause' [in Section 170 of the Constitution of Kentucky] and then deduct the homestead exemption or is the PVA required to make an artificial division of the real property and merely apply the homestead exemption to the house and lot of one acre. "
As stated in your letter, Section 170 of the Constitution of Kentucky provides an exemption for a person 65 years of age or older where it states as follows:
". . . and real property maintained as the permanent residence of the owner, who is sixty-five years of age or older, up to the assessed valuation of sixty-five hundred dollars on said residence and contiguous real property, except for special benefits."
The Kentucky Supreme Court in Parsons v. Dils, 189 S.W. 1158, 1159 (1916) defined "contiguous" as follows:
"Adjacent, in actual close contact, touching, near; adjoining, neighboring; lying adjoining; touching sides; touching along a considerable line."
In Parsons v. Dils, the Court held that two tracts of land which merely touched at a corner so that it is possible to step from one to the other without crossing any other tract of land were contiguous under this definition.
Under the definition of "contiguous" set forth above, it is clear that the entire 20-acre tract (surrounding the residence) in your example would be contiguous to the residence. Therefore, the amount of the homestead exemption should be applied against the value of the total 20-acre tract.