This year the state, to offset taxpayer complaints about the impacts of the Common Levels of Appraisal on education tax rates throughout the state, is artificially tinkering with those CLAs, adjusting all of them by 72%.
That adjustment may or may not deflect taxpayer pique at this year’s education tax bills, but it will definitely help confuse budget discussions at school boards this winter.
In Vermont, the Common Level of Appraisal (CLA) is used to assess how close to fair market value any town’s real estate appraisals are at any point in time. Because all property wealth in Vermont is socialized, knowing how close each town is to 100% of fair market value should make socialization fairer.
Towns are required by law to reappraise if their CLAs fall below 80%. Queue the pandemic which grossly and rapidly inflated property values throughout our communities and throughout Vermont. Add in shortages and multi-year backlogs for real estate reappraisers to tackle Vermont’s backlogs and you get what resulted in CLAs that ranged from 60 to 71 percent in our community last year.
Truing up those CLAs made for tax rate increases that ranged from 10.5 to 19.3% last year from Duxbury to Warren. We were not happy campers in our district and voted down two school budgets before approving a third.
Well, the Legislature decided that CLAs were being blamed by taxpayers for those increases so the Legislature is artificially adjusting CLAs by 72%. That number, 72%, could have been drawn out of a hat for all the explanation and rationale behind it.
The “new” CLAs for our district range from 144% in Moretown to 73% in Warren. The higher your CLA, the lower your tax rate. But what is unsaid here with this fuzzy math is that in addition to tinkering with the CLAs, the state is infusing another $33 million in one-time funds in the ed funding equation this year.
That makes all this math unreliable and suspect. Taking money out of one pocket and puting it in another doesn’t impact how much money we have or how much we spend.
