County governments are absolutely dependent upon the collection of taxes from their constituents in order to properly take care of its responsibilities in regards to police services, fire services, street lights, hospitals, schools, sanitation, storm water and the like. One of the most important taxes, if not the most important, because of its usual consistency is the collection of real estate property taxes, from residential homes, apartments, farms, land, manufacturing plants, corporate retail offices, corporate retail stores, and the like. Basically, everything within the county that is located on land, can be subjected to county property taxes, but there are, as in most everything, exceptions to that rule. For instance, most non-profits such as universities and churches are not subject to a real estate property tax, so that these institutions are basically being subsidized by the people and by those corporations that do pay their fair share of those taxes.
When it comes to the paying of real estate property taxes, the general rule of thumb of how much a given entity will pay is the fair market value of that property in that given fiscal year, subject to pertinent exemptions, set aside for senior citizens, or military veterans, or as in a homestead exemption. Also, in fairness to real estate property owners they are permitted to dispute and to appeal against the county Assessment authorities, when their reasoned opinion of the fair value of their property indicates such; and in particular when they have compelling evidence that would indicate that value should be materially lower.
All of the above seems to be rather straightforward, but anytime that county governments are dealing with corporations, and especially corporations of meaningful size; that is, of worth in the multimillions, and even multibillions, those corporations are going to have a strong tendency to want to see that they don't pay more than what they feel that they should pay for property taxes and the like; which is why they thereby petition county governments as well as any other pertinent governmental officials and departments to purposely get themselves special consideration so that they do not have to pay what might be considered to be a fair property tax rate, but rather are provided with a reduced rate instead, perhaps because of their undue influence upon governmental officials, or their uncanny ability to get tax set asides and thereby preferential tax treatment.
As a matter of course, how much a given homeowner pays in property taxes, is a public record. So then, in consideration of the importance as well as the personal expense in the paying of those taxes it would seem that all historical records in regards to the payment of those same taxes for corporations should be readily available for not only governmental officials to see and to, as necessary, justify; but of equal importance, for the general public to see, so that they can better understand as to whether or not they are actually paying more than their fair share in property taxes, and therefore carrying much more weight upon their already burdened shoulders, especially as compared to those multimillion and multibillion dollar corporations. For we should not forget, when certain entities are accorded special discounts to what should be fairly applied in a fair manner to all, then those that are not accorded those same sorts of similar discounts, will end up paying more than their fair share, perhaps a lot more.