economy

Expanding the urban tax base
by Eric Jackson

The posters bore the symbols of Catastro and ProNat (Programa Nacional de Administracion de Tierras) --- both governmental organizations that deal with questions of land tenure --- and urged Calidonia residents to come to a meeting that would bear some relationship to titles to property. One might think that in a time of massive rural land grabs, of feeder streets and structures that will put the Cinta Costera's physical effects well north of Avenida Balboa, of an ever changing government threat to make area residents pay for the Cinta Costera through special tax assessments, of changes in bus routes and of city real estate prices driven artificially high by a speculative binge only recently deflated, a lot of people might be concerned that the government was up to something designed to strip them of their land tenure. And indeed some were, but fewer than a couple of dozen area residents, almost all of them over 50, showed up at the meeting.

A women junior in age to everyone in the audience, representing not the government directly, but Consorcio Esptisa-Stereocarta (COES), a private contractor hired by the government to develop a modern land registry, assured those who showed up that this has nothing to do with special tax assessments, the Cinta Costera, government plans to claim eminent domain or other consequences of urban planning decisions. Her company was hired to carry out a decree that was passed in the 90s and modified in 2001 and further specified by 2005 administrative regulations, aimed at normalizing real estate titles across the country. COES has now been assigned a portion of the city, after having worked Veraguas, Los Santos, Herrera and Darien over the past decade.

(If someone wanted to get into hardcore cynical questions, she or he could get into irregular processes by which successive waves of high government officials or their relatives ended up getting titles to large tracts in the Darien, beach fronts in Los Santos and so on. But the meeting didn't get into that, and it seems that in any case one would more properly direct such questions to Catastro (the government land surveying agency), Reforma Agraria or ProNat, rather than COES.)

This is just the development of an urban land plat system. Aerial photos have already been taken and COES folks are going door to door to talk to people and determine who owns what, or thinks they own what they have. The company estimates that one-quarter of the real estate in the Panama City corregimiento of Calidonia is untitled. "We want to see who has titles and who does not have titles." That is necessary, it was explained, so that the city can enforce its land use and zoning regulations, so that the failures of the state-owned Banco Hipotecario to deliver titles to people who had paid off mortgages or land contracts could be remedied --- and so on.

Using the aerial photos, information from a variety of government registries and offices, the maps from the Instituto Tomy Guardia and the information gathered in the door-to-door surveys, COES will make an up-to-date land tenure map and a digital real estate ownership register. "There is a 2006 law requiring official titling now," it was explained. "In reality, this program benefits those people of scarce resources who have not been able to title their property."

But of course, the great majority of people of scarce resources in Calidonia own no real estate and would be naive to expect the government to give them any.

So what's the principal aim?

The COES lady said that her company's work is part of "a good faith project," and in her presentation she did acknowledge that among the "other goals" is an effort "to increase the levels of municipal income for the benefit of public works."

Yep. They want to get real estate and its owners on the rolls and paying property taxes to the city. Hasn't that been the main reason why, since the dawn of civilization, governments have wanted to know who owns what?

There will, of course, be ancillary benefits and liabilities --- depending on a person's relationship to the land --- flowing from having a reasonably accurate registry of urban land ownership like all well run cities have.