The new residential property tax rate for 2007 is $2.5281.
Congratulations to the Brattleboro Selectboard, the Town School Board, the BUHS School Board, and our representatives in the Vermont Legislature. For the second year in a row, your combined efforts enabled Brattleboro to defeat Millburn, New Jersey, and South Elgin, Illinois, for having the highest property taxes of any town or city in the entire United States.
If, however, you have recently relocated to Brattleboro and are wondering why your annual property taxes are more than your mortgage payments, or do not understand why your monthly rent is twice the amount that it should be, there are fourteen reasons property taxes have been, and will continue to be, out of control in Brattleboro.
(1) Brattleboro no longer has a relevant newspaper that binds the community together by writing intelligently about local issues. The Reformer editorials are antagonistic, lack balance, and oftentimes are just plain dumb. Subscribing to the Reformer is the equivalent of waking up after a great night sleep and finding a dead mouse in your mailbox.
(2) The state property tax system has evolved into a complex set of confusing laws that taxes the ever increasing unrealized capital gain on real estate known as the common level of appraisal. This has transformed affordable Brattleboro properties into an unaffordable urban investment commodity (i.e. High Point Estates) to be flipped for a profit.
Because of Act 60 and Act 68, fifty-one percent of all the homes in Brattleboro are now owned by non-residents many of whom have out-of-state incomes. Their que sera attitude about property taxes is their tacit approval of the level of spending that local residents can not afford.
(3) The planning and permitting process in Brattleboro’s has a lengthy history of latent bigotry against anyone who is financially successful. This has resulted in a stagnant grand list that can no longer sustain the town and school operating expenses while maintaining the town’s worn out infrastructure.
(4) Brattleboro is suffering from a massive youth drain because the town has become a net exporter of college graduates. These energetic, bright students whose entrepreneurial spirit would reinvigorate Brattleboro’s economy are not returning home. Paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education to work in a minimum wage economy is not a viable option for them because it has no future.
(5) Vermont is governed by the mistaken belief that the best way to restrain property taxes is to increase consumptions taxes. As a result, fifty percent of all local disposable income is now spent in New Hampshire. When the new Wal-Mart Super Center in Hinsdale is completed, the hemorrhaging of local disposable income will exceed seventy-five percent that will decimate the remaining retail grand list in Brattleboro.
(6) Because of state labor laws with respect to contract negotiations, Representative Town Meeting has become irrelevant to the budget process. Both the school and town annual budget increases are now on autopilot and homeowners have no say in the matter.
(7) Brattleboro is ill served by its elected representatives in Montpelier who are more interested in personal vendettas and scoring political points instead of fixing the state property tax crises that they created. Unfortunately for Brattleboro homeowners, the Vermont Senate is currently run by a megalomaniac from Putney who represents no one, other than himself.
(8) The advances in digital technology, in combination with an obstructionist planning and permitting process, has resulted in the most profitable and best managed companies in Brattleboro to be home based which are invisible the grand list.
(9) Transient residents, who can not afford an automobile much less own a home, are using the scare tactics of global warming, impervious surfaces, and loss of open space to promote their self-centered agenda of controlling other people’s private property. Their actions have resulted in a no-growth sentiment throughout town government that, ironically, has inflated the cost of property (less supply, higher prices) making home ownership in Brattleboro even more unaffordable.
(10) Brattleboro has evolved into a community of self anointed utopian social planners whose personal balance sheet in life is zero dollars and no sense. They actually believe that everyone in town should genuflect to their “wonderful vision of Brattleboro’s future” paid for with your money because they have none of their own. Their ethnocentricity is only exceeded by their unbridled arrogance.
(11) Brattleboro has become a town where an individual’s right to object to the plans of an adjacent property owner has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Brattleboro Memorial Hospital’s ten million dollar patient health care expansion was delayed a full year in the permitting process because one abutting property owner did not want to look at a parking lot from her bathroom window.
These types of pervasive “me, me, me, what about me” obstructionism has killed the expansion of the business portion of the grand list which is now reflected in the homeowners property tax bill. It also explains why Brattleboro's once dynamic economy has become an ongoing arts and crafts hippie festival with entertainment wannabe's who have no talent. The screeching on BCTV is proof of that fact.
(12) Twenty-five years ago businesses relocated to Brattleboro on account of the public school system. That is no longer the case. Because the school overhead expenses and teacher contracts are fixed regardless of the number of students, Brattleboro is losing approximately two million dollars a year in state education funding (Act 68) that local taxpayers have to pay for because a growing number of children are opting out of the public school system.
(13) The Town School Board and the Brattleboro Union High School Board have become professional budget apologists who, for some inexplicable reason, are terrified of using the word “no” during contract negotiations with the Windham Southeast Teacher’s Association.
(14) Brattleboro is a community that justifies its property tax increases predicated upon the town’s greatly exaggerated “quality of life” perception that it has of itself. If that quality really did exist, then the town would not have twenty-one (soon to be twenty-two) gas station/junk food outlets that adds minimal value to the grand list.
Addendum: To confirm how totally “off the wall” property taxes really are in Brattleboro, listed below is a property tax comparison of various locations throughout the United States. Their 2007 tax liability is based upon owning property assessed at their fair market value of $250,000.
$ 6,320 Brattleboro, Vermont
$ 3,287 Seattle, Washington
$ 2,565 Ashville, North Carolina
$ 2,150 Coral Cables, Florida
$ 2,020 Nashville, Tennessee
$ 2,010 Hyannis, Massachusetts
$ 1,996 Fort Collins, Colorado
$ 1,626 Williamsburg, Virgina
$ 1,500 Malibu Beach, California
$ 735 Honolulu, Hawaii
$ 580 Hilton Head, South Carolina
Who could have possibly imagined that it would be eight times more property tax expensive to be naked in the Harmony Parking lot than on the beaches of Hawaii?
Way to go Brattleboro!