Why prevent a church from applying property tax exemption?

[Clay Fouts]

I'm a residential landlord myself, but this question regards a puzzling situation in my church's relationship with its landlord. The church has a NNN lease on a building that includes a shared parking lot. How the parking lot is apportioned is left completely unspecified in the lease. Our locale allows for churches to apply for exemption from property taxes both on wholly leased and shared facilities. We've already successfully claimed exemption over the building portion of our lease. We now want to shave off some more of the NNN costs by having the municipality exempt our relative portion of the property tax on the shared parking area.

This of course entails discerning what proportion of the parking area is "ours." The city doesn't weigh in on or seem to care much about how the apportionment is done, so we tried to make the landlord's job easy by sketching out a couple of scenarios using various realistic justifications. The landlord refuses to accept any of it, and we can't figure out why. From a money perspective it should be a wash on their end. Our NNN monthlies would be reduced only by the amortized amount of the tax break. Unless they're in an extreme cash flow crunch and are relying on the prepays as a stopgap (or don't intend to pay the taxes in a timely fashion), I can't see what this nets them.

Anyone have insight into what might be motivating their unwillingness to work with us on this seemingly innocuous aspect of our relationship?