Orange County has been offering landowners up to a 70% property tax break since 1988 if they agree to keep commercial or residential development off their land for at least five years. Now neighboring Lake County may give it a try.

They are the only two out of 67 counties in the state even exploring the concept since it surfaced 13 years ago.

Orange and Lake counties want to build up their good underground water supply by allowing rainfall to seep easily through porous soils. Concrete office buildings and cement pavements block such routes.

The idea sounds workable on first glance but there have been no takers to date.

The provision was put on the state books after back-to-back freezes in 1985 and 1986 wiped out 90% of Central Florida's orange and grapefruit crops. The growers' lands were left barren, yielding little revenue, until landowners felt they had no option but to sell their dirt to commercial and residential developers.

Environmental groups sought to slow development and backed the tax-break proposal. The concept behind the break was that landowners would be earning the discount legitimately because, in effect, they still would be growing a valuable commodity for the state, namely drinking water, far-fetched as that may seem to some non-agricultural factions.

Landowners accepting the tax discount might even be called water farmers, some suggested.

Each of the state's 67 counties decides if it wants to offer the tax discount which could, conceivably, reduce a county's revenue by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Voters approved the measure two years after the last great freeze in 1986.

Although Orange County has struck out so far in interesting landowners to accept the tax break, neighboring Lake County, hurting for rainwater, now is considering making the same offer.

"This one is a bizzaro," Dean Fritchen, a senior broker in Arvida Realty Services Commercial Division, Winter Park, FL, tells GlobeSt.com. "Why would a landowner holding acres of vacant land, probably worth millions if rezoned for a development site, opt for a tax break instead?"

Fritchen says a landowner might go for the tax break if he weren't pressed for immediate funds. "I don't think too many people are in that enviable position today," Fritchen notes.

Lake County officials and politicians, however, are moving slowly on the tax-break measure. In the first place, they don't even know how many acres there might be in the entire county that could qualify for the discount; how much the county would suffer in lost tax revenue; or even how long it would take to come up with the information.

If a landowner accepted Lake's offer, he would have to keep development off the property for at least the first five years of the tax-break period. If anything were built on the dirt within five years, the total discounted tax amount would have to be repaid to the county along with an 18% penalty.

"It isn't happening in Orange County," notes Fritchen, the Arvida broker, "and I would be willing to wager it isn't going to be happening in Lake County, either."