Vermont's education funding program provides an element of income sensitivity for taxpayers with household incomes below $110,000. That sensitivity used to come in the form of a prebate check to taxpayers, but now comes directly to the town and appears on taxpayers' bills as a credit.
Income sensitivity is part of Act 60 and 68 which were designed to create substantially equal education opportunities for all of Vermont's students. The idea behind the legislation is that some towns have greater property wealth than others and can generate more money for education than others. But living in a property wealthy town (gold town) doesn't make individuals wealthy - as is fairly easy to see by comparing just the amount of income sensitivity distributed in local towns.
Warren, Fayston and Waitsfield are considered property wealthy towns, yet the average property tax credit in those towns is significantly higher than the credits in non-gold towns. Fayston's average credit is $2,107. Duxbury's is $902. Waitsfield's is $1,792, Warren's is $1,935. Moretown's is $1,051.
By state definition, Warren, Fayston and Waitsfield are gold towns and Duxbury and Moretown are not. It's interesting to note that the rawest data (income sensitivity money received divided by number of recipients) shows a greater need for income sensitivity and tax relief in the so-called wealthy towns.
It must be noted that the legislature, in creating this system of providing the property tax relief money directly to towns, also allowed taxpayers to apply their income tax refunds to their property tax bills - although statistics (and lies and damned lies) as to what percentage of Vermonters did this are not available.
What might be more interesting would be statewide statistics on average amount of income sensitivity credits in all of the state's so-called gold towns versus its poor towns.
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