 I wanted to talk about the tax bills that we all got last week. Some of us were pretty surprised our tax rates went up or not our tax rates but our tax bills went up pretty significantly so I imagine you're hearing from people in the neighborhood and in the city. What are you hearing from them? I hear I hear a lot of concern about general affordability about people's ability to stay in the city. Concern for where things are are headed. Yeah there's a lot of pain clearly with this tax reassessment. And why did it take so long for the city to do this reassessment? It seems like it was overdue. You know I have heard that but I'm not aware of other towns in Vermont doing this differently and I may just not be aware of that but the state of Vermont requires us to do a reassessment when we get out of alignment with market value by a certain amount. So they have their benchmarks that they're looking for that will trigger a reassessment and then when that reassessment is triggered then we spend the big bucks and it is a very expensive endeavor so I don't think municipalities take it take it lightly to do a reassessment. This was a two-year process. It cost millions of dollars so it's not something we want to do when we don't need to. And you also have another life in the real estate world. How would you characterize the property values and the sort of the trend line in Burlington for residential and commercial property? Well I've been selling real estate for over 10 years and during that time Burlington has never had much inventory and then there's always this expectation that we're oh well if we just wait a few months more inventory is going to come online it hasn't happened in 12 years. And then during COVID I think personally I kind of expected things to soften a little bit. I didn't think that people would want to be out shopping for houses but it turns out people did want to shop for houses and not a lot of people wanted to sell their houses so demand increased supply did not. People wanted more space because they were in their houses more so people who had been happy in smaller spaces now wanted bigger spaces. As we all know there's also pressure coming from out of state so this year even more than last year the market has been painfully intense I would say with most things you know a realtor will price it above what we think the the comps show us and then the market will push far above that. What about the people who are experiencing 20, 30, 40 percent tax increases on their homes? What can the city do for them? Can they get relief? Now nearly 70 percent of our property taxes are education taxes and for the education portion of your tax bill there is relief that is you know related to your income. I think that dollar amount changes every year but it's in the range of if you're making less than $140,000 a year you are eligible for income sensitivity on your taxes that can give you some tax relief and I have been surprised that many people actually aren't availing themselves of that and that's really important so when you file your homestead claim on your income taxes you also need to apply for this property tax credit. So you're seeing people that haven't that are eligible but have not applied for it? Yes. I think I've misunderstood what revenue-neutral means. Yes. We we often make the quick claim that that the taxes are revenue-neutral and that's mostly accurate it's not completely accurate so if they were completely revenue-neutral and we had a tax base of a million dollars and we needed to generate $10,000 out of that million dollars then when our grand list goes up to two million dollars the tax rate would be cut in half so that we still only generate $10,000 from that grand list. So after reappraisal reappraisal for the municipal side of the budget was generating about 34 million dollars I'm not the best remembering numbers but these so take these as rough numbers but it was about a 34 million dollar municipal revenue that increased to 35.7 million we have we have about 1.7 million dollars in additional revenue but that is because the voters actually voted for a tax increase so a million dollars of that is the voters voted for that million dollars of increased revenue and then about 500,000 dollars of that is something that the the rate will adjust but it's what's driving that rate is what we need for the retirement fund so the retirement fund funding the retirement fund is based on how the fund did it's not really based on what our tax base is or anything else it's how did the fund do and what does the city of Burlington need to put in that fund to make it whole so that is a dollar amount that will then be translated into a rate so we have a $500,000 increase for the retirement fund and about $200,000 is distributed over over some other funds that are not completely revenue neutral something like that we voted and the taxpayers have voted for them when we vote for a penny for parks that is not a revenue neutral tax however we did not increase that tax as much as we could have so we still have room in the approved voter approved tax rate to raise that more so we raised some additional revenue through penny for parks but we didn't raise it to the extent that we could have raised it and also those are much smaller figures within the overall budget and I don't think that that's really what people are feeling what people are feeling is the redistribution of the tax burden that is the primary reason that somebody's taxes are going up 20 30 or 40 percent or more mine went up more so that's that is because certain areas of the city the market has increased their value more than other areas of the city and one of those shifts is from commercial property to residential property but there's also shifts within residential property and from neighborhood to neighborhood so the value of commercial property has gone down in relation to the value of residential property is that what you're saying I would not say that anything has gone down but that it has gone it hasn't gone up as much relative to other properties and 60 percent increase and your property value only increases 20 percent you're going to actually see a tax decrease but your assessment still goes up so just remind taxpayers if they need relief what's the process now so we went through one level of appeal and for two-thirds of residential property owners they saw no change which to me is problematic when the when you bring new information there should be a change it might not be a big change and it might go up rather than down which isn't what you're hoping for but new information will result in some change in the fact that two thirds of the property taxpayers got no change in my view is problematic and something that once we get through this process we need to be looking at that so if you're among those or you didn't like the results of that appeal you could appeal again but the deadline for that appeal was July 22nd some people got their tax bills after that I know for myself we didn't get any mail for some reason our mail wasn't delivered for two days so the tax bill for some people came after that deadline the the tax bill even though that does incentivize people to appeal you're not appealing the tax bill you're appealing your value and if you don't think you can sell your home for that much that is a reason to appeal the value the fact that the taxes are high are unfortunately not a reason to appeal the value you can appeal the taxes themselves but that I will say unless the city did something wrong or unless you can prove that you actually cannot pay those taxes which is a very high bar you're not likely to get relief through that process so the the next step is next if you feel that you are not assessed fairly you can appeal next year but we have nearly 700 I am on the board of tax appeals as you said our volunteer citizen body has almost 700 appeals to go through and we have to get through that by the end of December so it's going to be extraordinarily difficult for us to to accomplish that goal and the timeframe that we have because I did consider like you know could we extend this for people but I don't think we have the ability to open this back up and attract more appeals we're going to be extremely challenged to to do what we have on our plate now but the window opens again next year so people can challenge the value of their home in 2022 for the July 1st tax bill correct yep okay the other thing that will happen is that through the appeals that we're hearing now um that will only like say um if you appeal the value of of your property and you get your property adjusted and your neighbor has an identical house with an identical lot but their value is still high um the tax assessor is going to be looking for those kind of situations so that the adjustment gets made in in other places so for we're in tax year 22 now is the tax bills you just got uh you're going to be stuck for this year but next year you may find that the tax assessor makes an adjustment even without your appeal to make it more fair with your neighbor because you have identical properties I understand well that'll do a process over time so thank you for all your work on this I know you've gotten a lot of feedback and as you said the board of tax appeals is a another task on top of being a city counselor and on top of having a job so thank you for your service to the city and thanks for taking a minute to explain just on a pretty high level what's happening with the tax bills and the tax rate well thank you so much Lauren Glenn for the opportunity to share some information with a lot of people I know are very concerned yeah thanks so much have a great week you too