BURLINGTON — City property taxes are set to rise more than expected due to a $1.8 million budgeting error, Mayor Emma Mulvaney-Stanak said this week — though she noted the increase could be offset by a drop in education taxes.
In the mayor’s initial $106.6 million budget — first presented to the Board of Finance on June 2 — property taxes were expected to increase by just $35, or less than 1%, over the current year. Three days later, however, Mulvaney-Stanak said a $1.8 million gap was discovered, stemming from an overestimation of tax revenue from commercial properties and a miscommunication between the Clerk/Treasurer Office and the Assessor’s Office.
To close the gap, the mayor said the city’s property taxes would instead have to increase by around $100 per year, or 2.5%, on a $500,000 home, bringing in around $831,000 in revenue.
Mulvaney-Stanak said most property owners will still experience an overall tax decrease in fiscal year 2025-26 due to a projected drop in the education tax rate.
“That was something that was, again, important to me so that, at the end of the day, people had a more affordable bill,” Mulvaney-Stanak said during a Tuesday press conference at City Hall.
Burlington School District’s Executive Director of Finance and Operations Nathan Lavery said the city’s education budget is expected to decrease by 4.5%, or about $360 on a $500,000 house.
Mulvaney-Stanak also said she would not receive a cost-of-living salary increase in fiscal year 2026, and other department heads would not receive it for six months.
“This is a very hard decision because my department heads work incredibly hard for this city,” she said. “This is why in six months I want to restore the 3% [cost of living adjustment] that we were originally budgeting for fiscal year [20]26 for department heads.”
The budget error also means that new roles — including a deputy city attorney and a housing-related position — will be put on hold, and the upcoming police academy class will be cut from four recruits to two. These reductions come on top of the 25 positions already cut across various city departments.
“That is important for us to actually structurally start to fix our budget because if we continue to have more employees than we could really financially sustain, that continues to make that gap grow over years,” she said.
Other expected revenue sources include a 25-cent tax increase for Uber and Lyft rides, $250,000 in anticipated development permits fees, and an estimated $200,000 from the hotel occupancy tax tied to a new hotel opening in downtown Burlington.
The mayor also highlighted two budget revisions: the restoration of $100,000 for UVM Health Network Home Health & Hospice and an adult programming position in the Parks, Recreation & Waterfront Department.
Mulvaney-Stanak said she is committed to transparency and informed Democratic and Progressive city counselors of the budget error on the same day it was discovered. To prevent similar errors from happening in the future, the mayor said the Clerk/Treasurer Office and the Assessor’s Office will create new procedures to outline the process for submitting grand list figures, and the City Assessor’s Office will move under the Department of Finance and Administration starting July 1.
Final budget numbers have not yet been determined.
“The administration is still working with City Council on a revised budget that identifies exactly how much of the $1.8 million will be in new revenues versus cut expenses,” Burlington Chief Administrative Officer Katherine Schad told VTDigger.
The budget may evolve slightly after consultations with city councilors. “I’m confident that we’re going to have an agreement with the City Council, both the Progressive caucus and Democratic caucus,” Mulvaney-Stanak said.
