This is an opinion column.

Ask a politician to change the way Alabama taxes timberland. You’ll get a funny look. Like there’s something loose up there.

Because those tax rates are the third rail of Alabama politics. Don’t touch ‘em or they’ll shock you. Because -- you know -- jobs and stuff.

And stuff.

I mean let’s face it. A lot of the people who are somebody in Alabama dabble in timberland and enjoy the way Alabama taxes it, or not. They don’t much mind if the so-called “current use” exemption lowers the market value of land to the point that many counties can’t pay for schools or government.

Top timber owners include U.S. Steel and AmSouth Timber and Alabama Power and Drummond Co. and Gulf States Paper, a virtual who’s who of who you’d want to woo if you were a politician. But that’s not all.

Gov. Kay Ivey herself – the Kay E. Ivey Blind Trust, actually – owns huge swaths of land in the Black Belt.

In Monroe county the Ivey trust owns 1,572 acres with a market value of $2.6 million. Because of Alabama's tax law the land was assessed for tax purposes last year at less than $60,000, or the price of a new truck. The trust, for 1,500 acres of land, was billed just $1,951 in taxes. That’s a buck and a quarter an acre.

More than 81 percent of land in Monroe County is private timberland, and three-fourths is owned by people who don’t live there, according to data Auburn professor Conner Bailey and his associates collected across Alabama. Which means the county, and others like it, see their potential tax base shrink. Critics argue the system – Alabama taxes timberland far less than its neighbors in Mississippi and Georgia – encourages large land owners to sit on their land rather than to improve it.

So government is not properly funded. Schools cannot excel. And Alabama stays the same.

Bailey’s data shows that 70 percent of Alabama is timberland, but that doesn’t translate to the state coffers. In a study on tax reform more than 15 years ago Susan Pace Hamill estimated timber producers contributed less than 2 percent to Alabama’s tax collections.

And while timber jobs are important – like any other jobs – forestry and logging and their support workers make up only a fraction of a percent of state jobs.

The current use exemption was billed as a way to protect jobs and small land owners from overwhelming taxes, and that seems like a good idea. But it is clear the tax system protects the powerful the most.

So what do we do? How do we protect the little guys and approach this third rail at the same time?

Bailey doesn’t come out and propose a solution, but he does offer data. If Alabama were, for instance, to remove the current use exemption on land holdings after the first 2,000 acres, small and intermediate owners – even Ivey Trust’s Monroe County holdings – would get a reprieve, but the top 5 percenters would pay some of their freight.

It wouldn’t change the budget dramatically. But it could give Alabama timber counties a little relief.

Such a modest proposal would add almost $300,000 to Wilcox and $350,000 to Sumter counties every year. It would add $410,000 to Monroe County's tax base, $780,000 to Escambia County's, and $12 million to all the counties combined. It would add a few million to the state itself.

It won’t change the world, but it would be a start. And it’s not the least bit crazy. If Alabama wants the way forward to be different from the way things have always been.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.