[T]wo weeks after state officials acknowledged that education property tax rates in Rochester and Stockbridge were likely miscalculated, local homeowners are still waiting to hear precisely how much they owe the town.
After the Agency of Education assured school officials the matter would be dealt with quickly, it now looks as if it will be the end of August before the issue is cleared up, according to Carl Groppe, the chair of the unified Rochester-Stockbridge School Board.
“It’s hard to feel like this is being addressed with any sort of urgency,” he said.
Ted Fisher, a spokesperson for the Vermont Agency of Education, said in a statement that “we are confident we will be able to resolve the data accuracy issue shortly.”
“One option would be for the select boards to waive any late fees to address concerns over meeting tax payment deadlines,” he said.
Local school districts have struggled to adjust to a new data reporting system rolled out by the education agency last year.
Problems with the new Statewide Longitudinal Data System have created a slew of downstream problems: it’s delayed the release of test scores (which still aren’t out) and complicated the federally mandated identification of struggling schools (this was ultimately resolved).
Residential property taxes go up or down depending on how much a school district spends per pupil. All other things being equal, when student counts go down, the tax rate bumps up. State and local officials suspect the district’s pupil counts are off.
Stockbridge Selectboard member Lee Ann Isaacson said the town government is taking a wait-and-see approach in hopes of more clarity from the state. Many people are paying their taxes as-is anyway, and the town plans to simply reimburse overpayments. The first payment is due Aug. 15, but Isaacson said the town doesn’t assess late fees until the second billing cycle in November.
“It’s more of a headache for the homeowner,” she said.
According to Fisher, only the Rochester-Stockbridge district “has informed the agency of potential errors in their tax rates as a result of potential errors in data.”
But he added that “adjustments had to be made for some districts that were forced to merge under Act 46 and the state Education Board’s order since these districts had a compressed time frame in which to adopt school district budgets.”
Chris Sumner, the finance manager at the Mount Mansfield Unified Union School District, said the Underhill town clerk contacted the district when the Vermont Department of Taxes first published its tax rates for Mount Mansfield’s five towns, saying the rate had increased far too much to be correct. Sumner said she called the state agency, where officials realized it hadn’t properly merged the district’s pupil counts. (MMU absorbed Huntington in June.)
The agency was able to recalculate the tax rate before town officials in MMU’s member towns – which also include Bolton, Richmond and Jericho – actually sent out tax bills to property owners, she said.
Groppe says he’s heard from state officials that both the Agency of Education and the Department of Taxes are struggling with understaffing. Since the Great Recession, the agency has lost a fourth of its staff to budget cuts.
Groppe says he’s sympathetic — to a point. “It seems like at a certain point in time, whether they’re down staff or not, the taxpayers need to have some certainty and some clarity,” he said.
