Council Votes To Maintain Uniform Property Tax Rate

By Adam Swift

As has been the case in past years, the Town Council voted to accept a uniform tax rate for residential and commercial property Tuesday night.

With the uniform rate, Interim Assessor Patrick Harring said the tax rate for Fiscal Year 2023 should come in at $10.70 per $1,000 of valuation.

The average tax bill would go up about 2.25 percent, or a little over $172 per year for a homeowner with a single-family house assessed at just over $624,000.

“The average single-family home in Fiscal Year ‘22 was $554,013, and that increased by about 12.8 percent,” said Harring. “The average single-family bill last year was $6,515.19. With the estimated tax rate that we are proposing tonight, that single-family tax bill would rise to $6,687.30.”

The average assessed value for a commercial or industrial property in the town for FY23 stands just short of $820,000, an increase of 16 percent over FY22, according to Harring. The tax bill on that assessed value would be $8,667, he said, an increase of around 6 percent.

This year, there were 267 residential properties, 21 commercial properties, and 191 personal properties that contributed to new growth.

“New growth is utilized in calculating the levy from year to year, the amount to run the town,” said Harring. “As you know, the increase of the levy is 21/2 percent plus the amount of growth. So the growth is an important amount that we calculate, and it’s kind of average for this year, it’s contributed $236,683.”

Harring said that there is not enough commercial development in the town to justify shifting a heavier burden of the tax rate on to commercial property owners wouldn’t make much sense, since less than 7 percent of the town’s property is commercial, and over 93 percent is residential property.

Legally, municipalities can vote to shift the tax burden onto commercial property by up to 150 percent. According to the assessor’s office, that maximum shift would result in only a 3 percent decrease in the tax bill for residential property owners, while commercial tax bills would increase by about 50 percent.

“The law does allow you to shift more on commercial, as high as 50 percent,” said Harring. “The history of the differential tax rate over the years, Winthrop has historically maintained a single tax rate. Shifting the rate on to the commercial, industrial personal property would create a greater tax burden on those properties while the residential properties would only benefit from a small savings, mainly because Winthrop is comprised of residential property at 93.8 percent.”