Last month the three-member Vermont Tax Structure Commission delivered a well-written, informative and conscientious report. The Legislature will now need to come to grips with some very large taxation change proposals. The longest part of the report deals with our complex property tax financing of education.
November property tax payments in Shelburne are running behind last year’s — to no one’s surprise. Town officials had prepared earlier this year for a loss of some tax payments because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
While these increases are extreme due to the pandemic, they are part of a long-term trend of unsustainably high property taxes, growing every year, to fund ever higher school spending that serves fewer and fewer students.
The Legislature is supposed to set the “yield” rate for Vermonters’ property taxes, but the economic chaos set off by the COVID-19 response has left the bean counters shrugging their shoulders — there is a great deal of “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
The Agency of Education is being accused of making the administration of special education expenses more complicated and costly than it needs to be.
The three towns with the highest tax rates in Vermont all begin with “W” and none of them are Chittenden’s Winooski, Williston or Westford. In fact, they are about as far from Chittenden County as you can get and still be in Vermont. They are all located in Windham County.
This year we learn the property tax rate will increase by a penny ($1.51 from $1.50 per $100 of assessed value for homesteads, and $1.59 as opposed to $1.58 for non-residential properties). This is necessary to fund an additional $70.5 million in new spending this year.
Vermont homeowners with professional incomes are well aware of the pain experienced when it comes time to pay the local property tax. The average effective property tax rate of 1.78 percent places Vermont at No. 8 in the top 10 highest in the U.S.
Just in time for the April 15 tax-filing deadline, a new online report shows that Vermonters have a lot of reasons to sing the blues: They have one of the nation’s highest state tax loads to bear.
Vermont continues to rank behind most other states when it comes to tax burden, according to a report by 24/7 Wall Street.
WalletHub found that states with the highest real-estate taxes are New Jersey, Illinois, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Wisconsin, Vermont, Texas, Nebraska, and New York.
If we don’t change our tax policies we will not only find that we can’t attract high asset retirees, but we will neither be able to retain our own. And, like New York, we will find ourselves wondering where our revenue has gone.