Wriggling under the cap
Be careful of what you wish for, as you may not like it. Yesterday’s post explored Massachusetts Proposition 2½, which caps local property taxes at 2.5% of fair value. So a homeowner is safe, right? Well, as the Boston Globe points out …
Many homeowners believe that Proposition 2½, the property tax limit approved in 1980, is supposed to prevent their own tax bills from rising more than 2.5 percent in any one year. But the 2.5 percent limit applies to the community as a whole, not individual buildings. A city or town cannot increase its overall property tax revenue by more than 2.5 percent from year to year (excluding new construction), but the mix of who pays what underneath that ceiling can change dramatically.
Faced with “soaring residential property values and stagnant commercial values,” city assessors have been revaluing residential property, with the result that:
Homeowners’ property taxes in the vast majority of Massachusetts cities and towns will continue their upward climb in 2005, with double-digit percentage hikes in Boston, Cambridge, Everett, and at least 40 other cities and towns, and smaller increases in Newton, Somerville, and Milton, a Globe review has found.
The median property tax bill for single-family homes across
If jacking up the property taxes outrages local voters, imperiling mayoral re-election, what’s a city manager to do?
“The Commonwealth [that is, the state government] needs to look at alternate sources of revenue for cities and towns that are not so reliant on the property tax,” said Robert Healy,
Translation: Don’t cut the city’s budget, don’t raise city taxes, take it out of the state budget. Yeah, yeah, that’ll work — but who pays for the state’s budget. Oh, wait a minute …
