 A quorum is not present of the town council, but I am still going to call the meeting of the town council to order at 10.30 a.m. It is not technically a meeting because we do not have a quorum, but no formal business and votes will be taken other than who will preside. But we're not, we're still going to hold our meeting. It just won't be formal. So we still don't have it, a quorum, even with Kathy here. The first thing we need to do, I am presiding in the absence of our president, Lynn Greesimer. I am the vice president of the town council. It is October 16th. I am not able to stay for the meeting. So under rule 3.1 of the town council rules of procedure, I am going to call for nominations to elect a president pro tem for this meeting because I will be leaving and we need someone to run the meeting. Do I hear any nominations for a president pro tem? I nominate Andy. Do I hear a second to that nomination? Do I hear any other nominations of a president pro tem? Andy, are you willing to accept that nomination? I will then call for a vote on the president pro tem to run the rest of this meeting on October 16th on electing Andy Steinberg as president pro tem for the October 16th, 2019. Non-meeting meeting of the town council. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. It is unanimous of those that are here. Andy did raise his hand. So I am now formally passing the meeting over to Andy and taking my leave. I think that our course of business is to hear from our principal assessor, Mr. Burgess. And so I will turn the meeting over to him to make his presentation. Well, thank you. Before I start, I'd just like to introduce my board of assessors with me, Mr. Morse, who is our chairperson. Mr. Hardreeze is a member, Mr. Heinz, who is behind me, is the third member of the board. They have been with me by three years in total for you. They've done this a couple of times. The purpose of the meeting is actually just to give you a little bit of an understanding of what we are going to ask you to do on Monday night, which is basically agree with us for the tax rate, being a single factor, and no other exemptions being raised. Please remember, anything I say today on Monday night is a recommendation. You are the only folks that are gonna make the decision. So you can change this at any time. That's a lovely slide, but I think we'll go to the next one. This basically just tells you the options we have. We're gonna vote on whether we have a single rate or a split rate on Monday for between commercial and residential. And then the other exemptions are open space, this kind, small commercial exemption and residential exemption. I'm only gonna touch briefly as we go through this on the open space and the small commercial because we don't have any. So we'll deal with that as we come to it. The next slide, the total assessed values are determined. You, we must have this public hearing. This is the law, every year we have to have it. I will provide you, sorry, someone will provide you the information to the council to make classification decisions. The town manager and I are not required to make a recommendation, but we may. The next slide is basically just the excerpts of the law that allows you to do this. And it tells you a little bit more information and I'm not gonna go through that. On the next slide, we show the Classification Act given to being in 1978. And we have four classes of property, residential, commercial, industrial, and personal. The guidelines for that are set by the Department of Revenue and not by us. By the way, as I go through this, if you want, I'll answer questions, or we can just do questions at the end, whichever is easiest. Next slide, please. There we have the definitions of the different types of property. And basically, residential property. And the only thing I'm gonna tell you different, not different, but explain in the residential property that apartment complexes and multiple units are residential property. Massachusetts assesses based on use. And that is a residential use for the apartment complex. Everything else is fairly self-explanatory, except for the commercial, which we'll throw in the chapter nouns, which is chapter 61A, 61, and 61B. And those get special treatment because of their requirements. And next slide. This is gonna show you what are. So, it says commercial and then it lists forest land, farmland, and recreational. Did you say those were exceptions or those were included? Those are included in the commercial because they're generally for commercial use, foresting or farming, which they consider is recreation. I'm not quite sure how it's commercial, but they just put it there. Of course, we do have golf courses, so that'll be part of that. This slide shows the breakdown for the town of the amount of property. And our total property valuation is just over 2.5 billion. Of that, 2.29 billion is the residential. 194 million is the commercial. 87 million is personal property. The 4.7 million is industrial. Industrial land, it's a very small sliver. We couldn't get colors quite the contrast. But we have 6,219 residential properties. 490 commercial, 29 industrial, and 108, sorry, did I say commercial? Commercial, industrial, and then personal property. Next slide, please. This graph that designed to show you the breakdown of the tax classification distribution between commercial, industrial, personal, and residential. As you can see, residential has remained relatively steady at 80% for the last 10 years. And we have about 20% of the other three classes, which comes into play when we decide to talk about the tax rate coming along. Next slide. This is really what the hearing is about, and whether we're gonna have a split rate tax rate or a single tax rate. We bring the LA5 to you on Monday night. You're gonna see talking about selecting a factor. The factor of one means that all the property classes will be assessed equally, or sorry, we'll have the same tax rate. Factor of less than one means that we would raise the residential taxes, yeah. And factor of greater than one would mean we're raising the commercial taxes more and splitting them. Other way around, yeah, I knew that was the start of saying it. That's what we're here for. Yeah, correct me. So that's what we're looking at. On the next page, the factor of one will result in an estimated tax rate for FY 2020 of 2136. Please remember when we talk on Monday night, this is an estimated tax rate, and it has changed since I started doing this document. We've, it's a moving target until we finish with the Department of Revenue. We're projecting now a tax rate of $21.32, not 2136. So this is an example for you. For comparison, this is Amherst Neighbors' Rank for tax rates for 2019, and the commercial tax rates for 2018. As you can see, several of them, Mahoglio Westfield, Chickapee, West Springfield, the very large commercial tax rates. Next page, please. This shows you an example of what the residential tax rate would do if we make the complete change to 150%. The average single-family home on Amherst this year will be 374,000 valuation, and a tax rate of 2136 will generate $8,004 on taxes. If we adopted the split rate, the tax rate would drop to $20.00 and two cents for $1,500, and that's for $7,502 for a decrease of $502. Commercial valuations, the average is 524. At the 2136, it's 11,209. At the next tax rate at 150%, it's 3203. It's an increase of $5,599. Yes, go ahead. Yes. And for the industrial, our industrial average is 164,000. Now, that's very low, but most of our industrial is land. And at 2136, it's 3,513. And at the 3203, it's 5277. Or an increase of $1,764. So you can see splitting the tax rate between commercial and residential would be quite significant, and increase the commercial properties. Next slide. This is just a breakdown of communities that have a single versus split tax rate. And as you can see, the FY18, that's what the user year used. And there were 236 that had a single tax rate. There were 110 that split the tax rate, and then there were additional five, because five tax rates were either adopted to residential or commercial exemption. And basically, that is the end for that. And I and the Board of Assessors and the Manager all recommend a single tax rate. These are the other exemptions that are allowed. And this is the one that I believe we're gonna talk a little bit more about than the others, is the residential exemption. Oh, sorry. Next one. No, it does not. Sorry, you were right. The residential exemption allows for a shift of the tax burden within the residential class from the lower valued properties to the higher valued ones, and those owned by non-revenue residents. However, this also shifts the burden of rental properties. Residential exemption is a statewide exemption. We can use up to 35% of the average assessed valuation of a residential property to calculate this. This is a fixed amount of money, not 35% of each property that gets the exemption. And this automatically raises the tax rate within the residential class only. It does not impact the commercial, industrial, or personal classes of property. Next slide. Take a minute on that. So you're saying this is in power right now. Right now we have a residential, if it's owner occupied. No, we have no exemptions and the town of Amherst for owner occupied or commercial or anything like that. Something that you could do, but we don't do. Well, haven't done. It gives an advantage. I mean, it's hard to read it while we're going on, but if it's an owner occupied property, you would pay a lower tax rate. For the majority of people, but at a break even point, even the single family owner occupied property will pay more. You don't get it? Okay. This does not help an owner occupied house, you're saying? It helps the majority of the owner occupied property. But when you get up to somewhere about $450,000, anyone with evaluation over that, even if they get the exemption, will pay more because the tax rate has increased. Right, but this would help houses under that point. Okay. But it would penalize apartment complexes and things like that. I have a couple of questions on this. When I went and I read MGLC 59 section 5C, it said it's the owner occupied, but it's only the property that you use for your principal residence. So when you, so my first question is when you, I realize you're doing a rough estimate of what these are, but if some of the properties you said people might own two or three houses, but it would just be the home that they lived in and had as their principal residence that would get this exemption, is that correct? You're talking about two or three houses on the one lot? Yes, or they own two or three houses. So it's... If they own two or three houses on separate lots, they've only get the one exemption. If they own multiple houses on one lot, they would just get the one exemption for the property in total. Okay. It's a little bit complicated because we took, most people talk about residential properties. We talk with parcels and every exemption impacts the particular parcel, not the individual house that's on it. So just on following that up when you've done the calculation, the reason that rate is going up as I understand it is because you're still trying to get as much total revenue out of the tax assessment. So you're giving some a break, but does the apartment dwelling, does its rate go up more? So can you split the rate? Actual rate within the residential class was the question. No, what would happen is you would change the rate within the residential class. If you look at some... Right, I was trying to follow the math later, but I just, so if a large apartment complex, say one is pleasant, has multiple, they don't get the exemption. They won't get the exemption. But the rate becomes the same rate for them and the homeowner and just the homeowner gets the exemption so you can't split the rate within the residential class. Okay. Okay. And do any towns do this was my last question on... There are several towns do this. I think there's about 11 in total across the country. State. And I think there's about 11. Yeah. And most of those are communities that have also got a split tax rate because if you split the tax rate and some of them go up to 75% on commercial, if you do that, even with the higher tax rate within the residential class or property, everyone pays less taxes than the residential class because of the way it works. And the majority of those properties have more than 30% commercial industrial and personal property. At the maximum, we have 20%. So that's something to remember as we go along. The rate, could I just go a little bit further because there is more here? Sure. Okay. So if we go to the next page, this is briefly, I'm gonna touch on the small commercial exemption that is for property so the valuation of less than a million dollars that someone owns and has 10 or people, no more than 10 people working for them. We simply don't have any because most of our properties are rental properties. You've got an owner and then you've got business people occupying them so they wouldn't qualify. And then we have the open space exemption which we didn't touch on here because we do not have any open space class property and that is a board of the assessor's decision at this level for classifying the properties. If you look at the next page, this is a breakdown of how we have the parcels in the town of Amherst for the residential only and the mixed use because they have some residential parts to them. And as you can see, there's 6,277 and this just gives you a breakdown of the percentages of each class of property and whether they are likely owner occupied or not. On the next page, this is a single family home frequency. It basically shows you what levels we have properties at and obviously in between the $200,000 and $300,000 is the largest property class. And believe it or not, we do have residential property values at less than almost $1.4 million a single family. So we have over a million dollars, we have five of them all together. We didn't know that when I started here, trust me. If we go to the next page, this is a proven, before I go any further, I'm gonna tell you, I didn't do all this by myself. I had a lot of help, particularly from Athena and then Mr. Hardgrave came up with a lot of the information that we had coming along. So I'm not that good with computers as she is. So the residential frozen cons, majority of owner occupied properties would benefit and this would likely help first-time home owners. Non-occupied properties would pay increased taxes as a con. Owners of these properties may increase the monthly rent. The benefit is not income based, so anyone can get it. It shifts the burden to a higher priced home owners. Now I will say this, this will put in quite a considerable burden on the assessor's office at the first year we do it because even though we're estimating and we do have some reasonable information, we haven't updated it in quite a while so we would need to do that. If we did not do that, that would cause the last one, which is an increase, we would have to put more money into the overlay reserve because people have the right to apply for an exemption. If we didn't give it to them and they think they should have got it, they have 30 days to apply after the tax bill goes out. So it's for the sake of argument, if we had a hundred of those, you're probably looking at another $25,000, $30,000 in the overnight. So we would have to increase that. Now we have to overexplain the overlay if you do not know what it is. I can tell you what the overlay is if you don't know what that is. Okay. The overlay reserve is an amount of money that the assessor's request each year and that's figured into the tax rate. At the moment it's a little over $500,000 a year and that money is to allow us to pay for exemptions for the personal people who qualify and debatements that people may get during the year. We have a conservative overlay amount at the moment but obviously we need to cover it. So if anything was likely to change, we would have to put more money into it to see what's happening. Any money that's not spent it will eventually return back to the budget. Next page please. Okay. Here's the fun part. To arrive at the figures in my estimates, I used 10% exemption, 15% exemption and 20% exemption. As you can see at 10%, any property that qualified for the exemption would receive 36,500. At 15, it's 54,000 plus and at 20% it's 73,000 plus. We have about, well, 62,83 residential units. I changed that around a bit. Of these, approximately 4,316 would qualify for the exemptions and 1,967 would not. If we use that amount above, the tax rates, I used last year's tax rate of 2,180. If we use 10%, that tax rate would go to 2,356. If we use 15, it would go to 2,454. And if we use 20, it would go to 2,562. And before anyone says anything about the $25, yes, because of exemptions, we can exceed the $25 limit. This is a little bit fast for me. This is if you're giving a homeowner exemption for an owner occupied house. Correct. This is the changes that would happen. It would lower the taxes on the cheaper houses. Is that correct? Of the 4,387, 4,316, anybody below evaluation of $487,000 that qualifies for the exemption would pay less. No, it could be pennies less. With the 15%, that number changes to 3,795. And with the 20%, it's after the $4,000. If you had a 20% exemption of a house below $450,000, how much money would they save? How much money would they save? Yeah. And last year's, if they qualified, the $1,500. That's money. Yes. But the other thing is once you get on going up of the ways, over 4,400, that's at the bottom end. But with the tax rate, once you get into $4,487,000, they will not save any money. And anybody above that will not save any money. And the chances are that people in the last quarter of that 4,000 would only save a few dollars or a few pennies. But on your chart, you had that majority of houses were below $450,000. Yes, but they don't qualify for the exemption? Well, it looks to me that people who have houses that are valued lower might be people who would really like to save on their taxes. So you're not convincing me, it's not a good idea is all I'm saying. I'm not gonna try and convince anybody of anything. I'm gonna put the facts before you. But the other side of that sort is all of the income housing and the apartment complexes are gonna pay at the higher tax rate. When the time comes, most of these apartment complexes are gonna have a tax writer. In other words, if the taxes go up, your rent goes up and your lower earning persons will be in those apartment complexes and they will pay more taxes. So that's, I understand what you're saying with a single family, but there's a wider board as well. Now if we go to the next page, this illustrates the 20% residential exemption, assuming a 2019 tax rate. Properties under 100,000 and under, with that exemption would save $691.28. And if you go all the way down and follow that second column all the way down, this is the changes in the taxes. So the apartment complexes, a $10 million apartment complex is gonna pay an additional $36,329.28. And the non-owner occupied one would pay $38,200. If you look at the $400,000 range, I'm talking with the last two columns here. If you look at the $400,000, that person would save $342 and then at $500,000 they'd actually pay more at $39. So that's for the breakeven point this for everybody. And if we go to the last page, or not the last page, we have never adopted a residential exemption. This is only an explanation. Many communities have split tax rate which affects the impact of the residential exemption. We're particularly asked about Cambridge when we talk with Mr. Angelis. Cambridge had a single rate last year, their tax rate would have been $8.37 per thousand. But they shifted under the commercial rate by 64%. So the commercial rate went to $13.71 and giving a residential rate of $5.84. If the residential had only been granted, it would have been $6.86. So even with the tax rate at $6.86, that is lower than the original $8.37 because of the split tax rate. And even with the exemption and because of the split rate, all residential played less. Cambridge has a 65% commercial base as opposed to Amherst's 10% base or so. Even with the split rate in Amherst, the exemption would cost higher taxes for some of the residential class. And the residential exemption in some of the communities along the coast was simply put in place to impact the non-residents year round property owners because as they came into town, they paid raised the values of the properties and they were only there part time. So the residents decided that they should pay more taxes, which I think seems fair. So the recommendation of the manager, the assessor and the board of assessors would be a single tax rate and no commercial or small residential exemption. The last page shows you a breakdown of this year's valuations. And as you can see, 90% of it is residential. Any at 0.78% of the residential? So that's where we are. If you have any questions, we're happy to take them. Not a question, but a thank you for answering my prior question and focusing me on the impact of rental tenants. I have a question in the beginning you talked about personal property and you said roughly 188 parcels. What is personal property? And on this last one, it's total valuation is 87 million. You said it's mainly utilities, but... Well, the value is mainly utilities. We've only got five or six utilities. Qualified for utilities. We'll have Bertrick Gas, the Western Mass Electric Company, and then we're going to the telephone company. It's not really utility, but it's valued by the state and our biggest player, one of our biggest taxpayers. And then we have several smaller communications companies now that are all, we classes, call them utilities. And they make up roughly $75 million of the valuation of the 87 million. The rest of them are all small businesses, such as the mom and pops across the street. And they pay on their inventory and the machinery and equipment. There's all their kinder tops and things like that. So all those are paid for. Okay, so they pay on the equipment inventory inside as well as the property? Well, they don't pay the property tax, the property owner pays the property tax. Because they're renting. They will be paying some of it in some way. In a solar field, would that be personal property? Would that be industrial? What would that be? Personal. Personal. Now we had, those are under pilots, which are payments on lieu of taxes. But because of the way the Department of Revenue has told us we have to do it. A normal pilot is outside the tax rate. These pilots are inside the tax rate. So we have to calculate a value for them every year and put them inside the tax rate. And I believe we're about $7 million, you know, all together for the four we have at the moment, with more coming. And then my last question is the two big institutions that aren't taxed in town, Amherst College and UMass. Do you ever do an assessment of the value of what their land plus buildings are? That's question number one. And the related question is to the extent there are commercial activities on those properties that are not specifically teaching. Have we ever looked at, could we be taxing that part of the enterprise separately? And I've just seen a few communities, Princeton had a challenge on this, for example, in the town of Princeton. Have we ever looked at that? Have we, the first is, have we assessed the value? And secondly, have we said, some of what you're doing looks pretty commercial. It's not just teaching. Yes, we've assessed the value. Not UMass, because we haven't got all their buildings online, but we have for Amherst College, and one thing I like, Hampshire College, and we do that simply to have it. In all honesty, from the point of view of an assessor, those are special use buildings. So I really, I'm just putting a construction cost on them more than anything else. They don't really have a market value. And yes, we have looked at the commercials and the exempt properties, and we do have a few properties that are taxed to Amherst College, and we have some banks taxed at UMass. We have the tax the leaser, no, the leasing, not the leaser, in those cases. So UMass is not taxed, but the bank is taxed. For ATMs and things like that. If, and I'm doing this as a hypothetical, and we'll bring it up, because I know it's not the topic we're doing now, but if you said they were operating a food service as a commercial that it wasn't just purely UMass, could you come in and look at the whole thing and say this is unrelated business and should be taxed? Yes, we could. Okay. Well, I want to say that I think that this might be a good year to do a owner-occupied house exemption because we are talking about our major projects, our capital projects, and we're discussing the property, a possibility of a tax override and which taxes will go up on houses. So I think maybe we should think about that. As I said, that's up to the council, but as I also said, our information isn't exactly up to date when the owner-occupied are not. I would ask or suggest that if you were gonna do it, you would consider it for next year and give us the chance to get all the information in place. So I have made more sense to me, but again, we can do it. Can we do it? Yes, we can do it. You have the time. But you need to come up to the microphone just because they're recording it for... I think Dave did an excellent job over viewings. Oh. I think Dave did a great job giving you the background of all this process. A couple of quick comments. One is this is tax policy and this is the council's decision to decide who benefits, who pays and Dave went over what exceptions or what options you have and you have to decide that. I had 100% support what David says. Get all the facts together. So if you wanna do this, get all the facts together next year so you're prepared next fall and also Amherst is very much, they like to be involved in processes. So you'd wanna involve the town in this process. The other more technical point of view is when David's talking about parcels, those are parcels, taxpayer parcels. So you might have one apartment with 300 units and that's just one parcel. So you need to understand the effect when you go through this. The other data we'd wanna get more facts about would be, it looks like the majority of the housing units in Amherst are rental right now. Again, this is without research, but it looks like that and it looks like a majority of those rentals are occupied by students. So again, that's information you'd wanna understand better. Just understand what's gonna happen when you start having apartments pay more. Is it affecting students? Is it affecting elderly? Is it affecting affordable? What's happening there? So again, if you wanna do that, I'd put something in place next year to have the information available for you. Yeah, I think that in my one hesitation about taking over as Chair Patent today was because I was a member of the Select Board. I'm the one who's actually dealt with this issue in prior years and some of the switch roles for a second. When the Select Board looked at this each year, it's not something that we just automatically did because it was recommended, but there were a couple of things that were ultimately important considerations. One is the uniqueness of our community and the distribution of residential to commercial. We really are tipped very hard, which makes it hard to have a split tax rate, so that was one part of it. As far as the exemption was concerned, ultimately each year when we did talk about it, factors that we were looking at was, do we know enough about the properties that would be affected at the high end because some of them are owned by people who have owned for generations and are living on fixed income? And so that you really take a great risk of affecting people who are on fixed income and ultimately then you come into the disruption factor. And when, if you make this change, it could have a huge disruption piece and whether that's a desirable thing to happen is something that now the council's the board that's gonna have to make that consideration. And I think there was one additional piece which you alluded to, which is that yes, number of renters are students. Students are a part of our community, but number of the renters are really low income and people who are living on very restricted income. And if you start looking around at some of the apartment complexes, they're not all students. Colonial Village is an example that I would throw out for consideration. And we have to realize that anything that would shift taxation to the rental properties, we have to be aware of who the tenants are and what the effect might be on the rents. And those are not easy considerations to make. But those are the kinds of things that we probably were struggling with each year. In the spirit of the strong recommendation of get our facts before we make any decisions, the point Annie was just making, I went back to your graph on the distribution of property values and homeowners. It looks to me if I said just picking one properties of $700,000 or more, we might end up with there 150 of those or whatever the number is. So it's not 2,000. Could we be doing an inventory both of how many are homeowners, as you said, versus rentals, but of those that have a high assessed value that look like they're homeowner, would we be able to do an interview, get some assessments so your house rich but income poor, or is there no way of getting that kind of information? Well, we could get the information, but you can't do anything about the assessment because the assessment's gonna be based on the market value. Right, and I'm just saying purely that we would say, we've got a couple hundred of these or a hundred of these that are the, you've lived in your house forever and the property is worth a lot but you're living on Social Security income, your income is low. So we think we're hitting a high income person but I understand you can't target this. This is not targeted at all. We are allowed to ask for income information, but it's only asked, we can't compel. We could definitely take a look and see what would happen. Looking around seems to be additional questions from council. In New York City, there are tax exemptions based on income for senior citizens. And I know from a previous meeting with you that we do not have that in Amherst but there's a policy where some people can work it off which I think meets the needs of some people but not of others. Well actually, there are several state exemptions that we have and Amherst has always voted for the highest one. We have an exemption for a blind person. We have exemptions for persons over seven years of age but within income qualifications, so we can do those. We have an exemption for a surviving spouse and as long as they don't remarry, that's in place. We also have several veterans exemptions, different classes and Amherst over the years, this is one of the things you will be asked for on a yearly basis as a town council to vote on, has adopted the optional exemption that allows us to raise those by 100% over a period of time. Amherst has adopted the optional exemption that allows us to increase those state exemptions by 100% over a period of time as the tax is raised on the property. So we have put a lot in place over the years and Amherst has always been very receptive to everything we've put forward. Okay, first of all, we need to just reflect for the minutes that it's 11.15, we now have a quorum of the council present. So we ask, no, we don't. That's right. Okay, we're still up. And I guess the other is because when Mindy left, I was elected under the council rules. So we've gone through, we had previously received in the packet the same slides that we have been looking at and asking questions about today. We're trying to isolate the help of Mr. Burgess, the decisions that the council will make when it has to have the tax classification hearing so that we can understand what each of the factors are. I think that the other point just to let you know is that the recommendation was that if we are going to consider any significant shift in policy, that we not do it in the first year, but that we ask for the information to be developed so that council fully understands the consequences of the decisions that it's gonna consider. And that's the most inter-residential exemption question. So I think inside, so go ahead. No, I'm just agreeing with you. So are there other questions? Just wanna echo Pat's thank you. I actually found these tables very clear and very useful to be seeing how the interaction with the rate happens because it wasn't obvious to me until you did the work of showing this. And I liked the last column which shows the actual tax change on it. So you don't just look at the rate, but you see minus your exemption. You're still, a lot of people are still paying more. So I thought that was very useful. Thank you. So the council will feel that there's additional information that is going to be helpful because we do have the tax classification public hearing scheduled for October 21st. And... Would you move your mic closer, please? The, just to remind you of the tax classification hearing is scheduled for 6.30 p.m. on October 21st. We wanna make sure that we have, at least from this group, is sufficient understanding of the issues that we will be considering. I think that the other factor in which gets back to Mr. Burgess's recommendation about fully developing an understanding amongst ourselves of what the ramifications of a change of policy would be. So we probably, as a council might wanna consider what steps we would wanna do to inform the public about what we're considering and the possible consequences because of the, if we institute a major change based upon prior experience, we don't get a lot of public that comes to the public hearing. But if there's a lot of notice that, hey, your taxes might change significantly, that could change a whole lot. And so I would also encourage the council when it gets to it to think about the kind of advanced public notice it wants to have because one question that came up was what do we know about the individual circumstances and the effect on individuals? And having advanced notice out to the public will inform people and they will come and tell us if it's going to affect them significantly. And that's something the council might wanna hear. Yes, Kathy, and then I'll start. The one suggestion I might have for the hearing is to have in your back pocket if you don't have it already. The chart you have which shows residential rates versus commercial, you can eyeball back and forth and you can see the communities that don't split them. But your point about those that have gone higher, so Cambridge, for example, have a huge commercial property base, it might be used to have that as a background if someone asks about it, so they're able, so I was going through, Greenfield doesn't do it, Northampton doesn't do it, and I was just doing by, this is the same number in both charts, but the charts not easily set up for that, but just be ready to have that, not just the Cambridge, because it looks like Agawam, a few others do a split rate and I'm assuming that what you said is often true for these others that they've got a decent enough a commercial base to be able to do that split rate. For the split rate, that's correct. The idea of Cambridge was to show what would happen with the split rate and the residential exemption. Agawam and all the rest of those communities out here, we do not have residential exemptions in any of those communities, so that's why Cambridge was signaled out. Okay, and so that's the only one that actually has the residential exemption also of that chart, yeah, okay. Dorothy. I was speaking up for an opinion that has been voiced here many times by Sarah Schwartz, which is that many people that she knows say that if the taxes increase, they'll be forced to move, and so I assume those are homeowners, so I do think it's something that we have to think about seriously. Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It's one of the things we have no control over, and I'd just like to say to Mr. Steinberg, I'm not sure if it was before you were on the select board or just after you came on the select board, but we did do a major study of the residential exemption at one stage about 15 years ago, and it was quite a turnout from the apartment owners who weren't in use. That's the people you're going to hear from are the apartment complex owners when this comes out. As you look at that chart in the apartment complex owner of $10 million is going to pay an extra $38,000 a year, and that's a lot of money, but that's who you'll hear from. Anything else? Evan? Yeah, one thing I almost forgot about. So the tax rate is decreasing 2% from last year? Yes, the tax rate is decreasing 2%, but in turn the residential values are going up by 6%. So when the values go up, the tax rate goes down, so that's what happened. We are on a five year cycle at the moment, and if we had it left at this year, our valuations would have been roughly 90% of market value instead of 95%, and right or wrong, I didn't want to leave that for the next assessor coming in, I'd rather push it up and get it back to where it should be and give them three years to work with it instead of coming on and having to make an adjustment next year. Yeah, I think that might be a comment that I see you're about to raise something too. I think most people don't understand the 2.5% increase applies to the amount of total taxation that we can make to the community so that as property rates is the assessment's increase because property is more valuable in the community, that means that the rate goes down. It's just, but there's another factor that we as a council ultimately have to be aware of because we're in a regional school district and not how property values are changing within each of those four communities is not the same, and that's part of the tension that goes into the regional assessment discussion, which is a separate process, but then comes back related to what we're talking about here. Mr. Spachman, so anything else? Because I don't think that going back to the agenda for today's meeting that there's anything else unless there's public questions, but public is really the Board of Assessors and I really appreciate all of your being here and on behalf of the councilors, I just want to thank you for being here and for all of the work that you do to make this tax system work and work fairly and then to be prepared to handle the appeals process should that come about, which the greater disruption we throw into the system, the burden's gonna fall back on you and so I wanna recognize that and I would appreciate your service for the community being on that board. Anything else from my councilors, members? If not, then I think we can declare ourselves adjourned.