Posted on 11/15/2005 5:03:12 PM PST by Past Your Eyes
Orford selectmen are defying a state order to use updated property-tax assessments that include valuable views on some land.
The townwide revaluation by Avitar Associates of New England found that views added $100,000 or more to the value of some properties, leading to protests against what some called a "view tax."
This month, the state Board of Tax and Land Appeals ordered the town to use the new revaluation instead of the previous one, performed in 1997, because state law requires towns to update their assessments every five years. The board also ordered Avitar to provide more justification for the values it assigned to views.
Last week, however, two of the three Orford selectmen voted to reject the new revaluation.
(Excerpt) Read more at gamma.unionleader.com ...
Having lived in New Hampshire for almost 30 years, I have seen the development of this tax issue.
The NH Supreme Court found in the NH Constitution a requirement upon the State that had curiously gone unnoticed for almost 200 years. This oversight was ascribed to justices much more eminently qualified than the confederacy of dress-up clowns and drooling socialist morons that currently constitute the NH SC.
If the authors of the NH State Constitution thought that someone would be able to torture and twist their words so as to "discover" a requirement to implement Marxist collectivist-redistributionist, centralized, tax-funded government-run, indoctrination day camps, they would have challenged that someone to a field of honor, or torn the constitution to shreds and re-written it in words simple enough for the ACLU lapdogs currently occupying the NH SC to understand.
The NH SC risibly found that the State had a responsibility to provide "fair funding for an adequate education", whatever that's supposed to mean. Of course, these terms are subject to vastly varied shades of interpretation and provide great fodder for endless litigation. A boon to the state's legal industry, and to the ACLU and socialist lackeys in particular.
Particularly humorous, in a dark sort of way, is that no matter how much funding you feed the state education monster, it is never, ever, EVER enough. If everyone in the state gave them their whole paychecks, they would still be bleating for more.
In the meantime, in order to fund this state-imposed, state-controlled indoctrination system, the state now controls how the towns implement the "property tax". Of course, wringing every last nickel out of the tax payer becomes the main object of this bureaucratic excess, and every little reason they can think of to squeeze you harder will be employed.
Despicable tyrants, all of them.
Amen, and amen.
The late governor of NH, Mel Thompson, was from Orford. His son owns a tree farm there. Old Mel would not have put up with this cr*p!
Mel's son, Tom, is leading the charge against this thing.
My family has known the Thomsons since they moved here in the '50s. Dad was Mel's first campaign manager. They both died of the same thing: complications from Parkinson's disease.
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