Taxes are due today

Charlestown property tax owners need to pay their First quarter installment on their home, business and car taxes today.

As regular Progressive Charlestown readers know, Tom Ferrio and I have covered town taxes in depth for several months, even providing readers with our famous Progressive Charlestown Magic Tax Calculator that turned out to be dead-on accurate.

For those of us who moved to Charlestown from other places, we found Charlestown’s taxes to be a bargain. That’s even after figuring in paying for services the town doesn't provide like waste disposal, water, sewage, etc. 

But from Progressive Charlestown’s standpoint, even though Charlestown taxes are comparatively low, they are not necessarily fair.

The most recent property reassessment has caused a significant shift in the town’s tax burden from millionaire absentee property owners to permanent working class residents. The shoreline properties got a significant haircut on their assessments while most middle-income homeowners got a lighter trim.

The result was that the town’s 21% overall tax hike hit people whose properties were in the $250,000 - $750,000 a lot harder than the million-dollar plus properties. 

Most of the town’s tax hike (15%) is the direct result of the nationwide real estate slump that caused $400 million of Charlestown’s tax base to evaporate. The rest was due to necessary increases in the town budget, including a $100,000 contingency to provide for the town’s defense against legal actions by Council member Lisa DiBello and her ally, former Council member Jim Mageau. 

In the course of examining Charlestown’s property tax system, we learned about our town’s elaborate system of tax relief ordinances. I wrote a seven-part series in Progressive Charlestown describing how these tax relief programs for veterans, the elderly, the disabled, and for churches and people who own farmland, forest land or potential open space. The series also covered how to appeal your assessment and what to do if you fall behind in your payments.

Some people know about Charlestown’s tax exemptions – for example, our cantankerous former Council member Jim Mageau has used the veterans exemption to avoid paying one penny of property taxes to the town for more than 10 years.

It would be a good idea for the town to make information about its tax relief program more readily available to all taxpayers, rather than leave it to them to find out.

We also need to consider ways to make Charlestown’s tax system benefit the town’s permanent residents. We hear frequent references to the homage we owe to our town’s millionaire absentee property owners because their big-ticket beach houses and McMansions contribute so much to the town coffers. 

Well, thank you, rich out-of-staters. Thank you very much for your money, but we want more. This town is a treasure and you should also thank us for letting you live here (and for putting up with a lot of your crap). 

Those of us who live here full-time not only pay our own share of property taxes, but also state income tax, plus we are committed to Charlestown’s community. In other words, we’re not here on vacation.  And we want tax justice.

More on this in the coming weeks.

Author: Will Collette