When Bob Champagne-Willis opened his email in late May, he was shocked to see the valuation of the highest taxed property in his tiny town of Maidstone cut by more than half.
“I’m very frustrated by this whole process,” said Champagne-Willis, a lister and treasurer in Essex County. “We’re the poorest county, and all of a sudden everyone’s tax bill went up a bit,” because at least in his town, the tax on the local electric provider went down.
In Vermont, towns appraise their property values themselves through listers like Champagne-Willis who are typically elected, contracted or employed by the town. Those properties can include homes, garages, businesses, farms and utilities. This year, the valuation of Maidstone’s electric utility, the Vermont Electric Cooperative, dropped by about 55 percent. The utility’s 2024 valuation of over $1.6 million shrunk to $724,800 in 2025, according to an email from the state tax department.
Champagne-Willis estimated the tax increase for his municipality would be about $1,900 split among about 365 tax bills that account for all the taxed parcels in the town. He was one of many town listers who began emailing each other and sharing their changed values.
“There may not be a big mystery, there may be an explanation,” said Deborah Fillion, one of three elected listers in East Montpelier in Washington County. She confirmed her own town’s utility valuation for Green Mountain Power and Washington Electric Cooperative, before a fair market adjustment, dropped almost 30%, from about $6.1 million to $4.3 million. “We’re just waiting to find out what that explanation is, but there’s quite a bit of talk among listers,” she said.
Utility valuations fluctuated in towns across the state last month as the tax department readjusted the valuation of nearly 20 utilities to better match national standards. Those changes were part of a larger overhaul pushed forward by the House Committee on Ways and Means to build a more consistent valuation system across sectors, according to Rep. Emily Kornheiser, D-Brattleboro, the committee’s chair.
Over the past five years, her committee has been working with the state tax department to build more consistent valuations, including helping towns appraise unusual properties like ski resorts or dams. Last year, the state began tackling electric utilities.
“The overall goal is for us to have fair and consistent grand lists throughout the state to support the work of municipalities,” Kornheiser said. “We want municipalities to understand that the state has their back when it comes to property valuations.”
But some listers remained confused as they adjusted to the new numbers. George Blakeslee, the town clerk and chair of the lister board in Guildhall, also in Essex County, said the value of property owned by the two utilities in town, Green Mountain Power and Vermont Electric Cooperative, saw decreases of 60% and 41%, respectively.
“Something strange is happening,” Blakeslee said. “That’s a lot of depreciation in one year.”
On Monday, the listers were among more than 90 people who joined a webinar hosted by the Division of Property Valuation and Review within the tax department. The meeting was led by the division’s director, Jill Remick, who’d spent the previous week fielding calls and questions from people across Vermont’s more than 250 towns who were confused about the changes.
Those changes aimed at solving issues that had plagued tax experts like Remick for years. For the last two decades, the state’s valuation was based on the utility providing an inventory of its properties and the state publishing those values, according to Remick.
“But assessing town by town is not how utility valuation should work,” Remick said.
Utilities are a unit, and they’re meant to be appraised as a unit. The way the state evaluated utilities for taxation was outdated and not up to national standards, so her department contracted with a utility valuation expert, Brian Fogg. He and his team created a new method that calculated a utility’s total value and then redistributed that value across Vermont’s municipalities roughly based on the number of electric customers in each town.
That new method increased taxes utilities pay statewide by about 7%, according to Remick.
“Utilities will be paying a little more overall,” Remick said. But while some towns’ utility valuations went up, others, including small towns like Maidstone and Guildhall, went down.
“Vermont has such tiny municipalities that some of these towns that are very rural may not have as many customers,” Remick said, noting a smaller customer base could lower their values.
Remick said the response her division had been getting from towns was tough because the division rolled out the new method at the same time the state Legislature began requiring towns to adopt those new values.
“Towns are like, I have this new value, and now I don’t have time to do something about it,” Remick said. “I understand it feels scary.”
The state has traditionally provided town-by-town valuations for utilities, factoring in the distribution systems, like the number of transmission lines or substations in a given community. Then, the town could choose whether to adopt the state’s assessment.
Those values get added to a grand list that exists in every Vermont town. That list compiles all the properties that are taxable for the state’s education fund and the town’s municipal fund. Along with personal property like houses and farms are properties with utility infrastructure. Those utilities include Green Mountain Power, Vermont Electric Cooperative and about 15 others.
Every year, unless tragedy strikes like a house or a barn burning down, each town expects their grand list to grow as people build more homes, sheds and garages. This is one the first times towns could see those lists significantly reduced, according to listers.
After the Monday meeting, Champagne-Willis said in an email that he came away with more questions. He worried that the per-customer valuation hurt small rural communities like his own.
“I did learn that the valuation is a complex animal,” he wrote, “but [I’m] discouraged that the process was so poorly rolled out.”
Remick said she could see the issue resurfacing in future legislative sessions.
Correction: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the number and type of utilities in Vermont.
