MONTPELIER — The Montpelier-Roxbury School Board isn’t complaining about “numbers it doesn’t control” this year, instead it is celebrating a couple of them.
After putting their $27.2 million budget request to bed Wednesday night, board members applauded Business Manager Grant Geisler for delivering a budget proposal they were told will allow for a 4.8-cent tax rate reduction in Montpelier, while limiting the projected rate hike in Roxbury to 1.6 cents.
“These aren’t final ‘final numbers,’ but this is pretty good,” Geisler said. “These are good numbers for us.”
Geisler told the board it helped he just learned the district has been credited with an additional 15 equalized pupils — cutting the previously projected decline from 27 to 12 and trimming 2 cents from earlier estimated tax rates for both communities in the process.
Geisler said the fact that the last target expected to stop moving before Town Meeting Day just moved in the right direction was good news for the district.
According to Geisler, the better news can be traced to an unprecedented increase in the “dollar yield”— a figure that will ultimately be set by the Legislature, but worst-case estimates indicate will increase by $1,620, or 12.7%, to $12,937 for the coming fiscal year.
Geisler told board members that increase had a game-changing effect on education tax rates in a year when outsized reductions in common levels of appraisal (CLAs) could have triggered steep rate increases.
Those CLA-related increases are part of the tax rate calculus in Montpelier, Roxbury and beyond, but were dwarfed by reductions allowed for by the increase in the dollar yield.
You don’t have to look past the projected equalized tax rate — the rate taxpayers in both communities would pay if property in each was assessed at 100% of fair market value.
Assuming Geisler’s latest estimates are accurate, the equalized rate would fall from $1.498 to $1.394 for a 10.4-cent reduction in both Montpelier and Roxbury.
Enter the CLA in two communities that are in the midst of reappraisals. Roxbury’s CLA dropped 8.1% — turning what would have been a 10.4-cent reduction into a 1.6-cent increase. Though Montpelier’s CLA is considerably lower than Roxbury’s, the one-year decline — 3.68% — wasn’t as sharp. Instead of wiping out the 10.4-cent reduction in the estimated equalized rate, it whittled it down to 4.8 cents.
That’s still a rate reduction in Montpelier. Meanwhile, Roxbury is looking at an increase, but it’s one, estimates suggest, that would only add $24 to the tax bill on a home assessed at $150,000.
Board members — including two from Roxbury — enthusiastically backed the revised forecast and unanimously approved a budget that calls for spending $27.2 million on the operation of the pre-K-12 district. That’s an increase of nearly $1.2 million or 4.5%, and includes the proposed use of roughly $300,000 in pandemic-related funding as a source of offsetting revenue.
david.delcore @timesargus.com
