Taxes keep rising despite property Deval-uation
By Howie Carr | Tuesday, May 10, 2011 |
http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
How can this be? The value of your home keeps going down, yet the property taxes never stop going up.
Back in 2006, didn’t candidate Deval Patrick promise to cut property taxes? If he does have to testify under oath at Sal DiMasi’s corruption trial next week, I hope someone asks him about that pledge, just to establish his reputation for veracity, or lack thereof.
“Governor, did you know you were lying when you vowed to cut property taxes, or maybe we all misunderstood you, and you really meant to say you were going to cut property values? Which is it?”
It’s that time of year again. Proposition 2 1⁄2 override season. Saturday they passed one in Scituate. Wherever you go, it’s the same old story. The selectmen say they’ve made “Draconian cuts.” They’re dealing with “fixed costs.”
Fixed costs means they can’t lay off their wife’s nephew.
Isn’t municipal government grand? I can sum it up in two words: Willie Lantigua.
And so the tax bills just keep on rising. Just ask Kathy from Foxboro.
“I bought my house in 2006 for $330,000, it’s now worth $240,000,” she was saying the other night. “The town claimed I had a ‘finished basement.’ I took the assessor down to see it. It has a dirt floor, only it was mud, because it still had 3 inches of water in it from the flooding last spring.”
Surely the town did the right thing by you, Kathy.
“I got a $17 reduction. I thought it was a joke when I saw the bill. Seventeen bucks.”
Another Draconian cut. Nowadays, everybody is running down to City or Town Hall to file for an abatement. But don’t forget to call ahead. A lot of these places close early now.
Town Hall’s got a million excuses for why your tax bill keeps going up.
State law, don’t you know. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs.
And God forbid anybody suggests maybe level-funding the school budget. They immediately threaten to cancel the football season.
“I bought my house in Springfield in 2005 for $150,000,” a guy named Joe was saying, “and I just sold it for $95,000. But my property taxes went from $2,500 to $3,000.”
And why do you have to file for a new abatement every year? If the house was overvalued last year, why does it go back to the old overvaluation this year?
Meanwhile, on Beacon Hill, the state hacks were holding a hearing last week to raise the income tax. They call it “An Act to Invest in Our Communities.”
Invest in our communities — sorry, I already did. In my own, and in Willie Lantigua’s.
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