Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Art Woolf, a UVM economics professor. It first appeared on Vermont Tiger.
In vtdigger.org, Jack Hoffman says my analysis that concludes that Vermont’s property taxes are the highest in the nation (or were in 2008) is flawed:
Now we know how Northern Economic Consulting came up with its ranking: Director Art Woolf decided he didn’t like the numbers reported by the U.S. Census and added $150 million to Vermont’s property tax total.
Here’s why I added $150 million. The Census Bureau estimates (and it’s worth noting that the number Census reports is an estimate, not a count) that Vermont’s total property tax collections in 2008 were $1,177,064,000. The Vermont Department of Taxes, Division of Property Valuation and Review (PVR), in its annual report, publishes the actual amount of property taxes collected. And that’s a count, not an estimate. PVR reports that in 2008, total property tax collections (page 4)were $1,354,600,000.
The difference between the PVR count and Census estimate is $178 million. I rounded that down to an even $150 million. I do plead guilty to Mr. Hoffman’s charge that
…if Woolf thought the Census data were wrong, why adjust only the Vermont figures? Mightn’t the other states be off, too?
Yes, they may. And I’m always very wary of only adjusting one state when I’m doing these types of comparisons. I wrote about that in The Vermont Economy Newsletter article in which this analysis first appeared. But in this case I do know that the Census estimate significantly underestimates the amount of actual collections in Vermont.
In addition the Census estimate shows total U.S. property tax collections rising from 2007 to 2008 and total Vermont property tax collections falling by about $60 million from 2007 to 2008. Property taxes don’t fall in Vermont. Even the Vermont Tax Department’s data show them rising by $100 million from 2007 to 2008.
That’s why I added $150 million to Vermont’s total. And that’s how Vermont ended up No. 1 in property taxes.
And by the way, if I hadn’t added $150 million, we’d drop all the way down to number 4.
