There’s a good chance I won’t post tomorrow, since we are holding our first Charter Revision Commission meeting tomorrow at 7:00. Among other things, we’ll be setting a date for a public hearing. As always, the big issue is the referendum. If you’re opposed to instituting a referendum, please come to the hearing. Here’s one small example of the havoc these things cause, and it’s always the education budget that takes it on the chin.
Note that the people in East Lyme that are spearheading this are complaining about rising assessments, which the mathematically literate know do not, in and of themselves, raise taxes. New assessments redistribute the tax burden. The people complaining are those whose property values have risen disproportionately to the other people in town, and, like the GGG folks here, they want to redistribute it back toward people who have homes of lesser value. If they can’t do that, they want to cut the services in which they have no interest (the article points out that East Lyme’s population is aging, hence the school budget will get hurt).
Of course, it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that this would not be an issue if the towns were not over dependent on the property tax. It appears that once again the legislature will do nothing meaningful about the problem. Real property tax reform won’t happen until we have a governor who cares more about the state than his/her standing in the polls.
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