After Reval, Grand List Skyrockets By 32%

"...it’s important to note that assessments can go up ...even if the property owner is on a fixed income, he said." I read this quote somewhere in a long forgotten article about the unfairness of property taxes as the primary fuel for spending by municipalities, particularly in relation to older homeowners, "Property taxes are the second mortgage that you can never pay off." Ahh yes, house "rich", income poor. Let's see how this all plays out.

So if you’re assessment went up by less than 32%, you are paying a smaller share of the tax bill. And if your bill went up by more than 32%? Not nearly as bad as one feared!

Also, if the City’s revenue needs stayed the same, the mill rate would decrease by 24%. That won’t happen because of inflation, but we should see a mill rate decrease of at least 20%.

The NHI wrote, "the taxable grand list is one of two key factors that determine a local property’s tax liability. The other key factor is the mill rate."
Not exactly. The other key factor is what the government plans to spend (its budget) which leads to a mill rate. After two decades of mind numbing property tax increases, City Hall better have a very good explanation for every dime of spending above last years budget and return the remainder to taxpayers by lowering the mill rate. A classic City Hall obfuscation is a mill rate decrease significantly less than the reval increase (higher spending). But taxpayers will be watching and the bottom line is that increased spending is increased spending...and needs to be explained.

We have, and have always had, a spending problem. There are built in contractual increases for personnel and benefits, but other discretionary spending can be cut. There has never been a serious program by municipal government to cut costs. Have every department start with a zero budget, and justify every line item requested. The result if done properly, might be eye opening.

Owen: CT has a host of elderly property tax breaks for low-income elderly, ranging from income tax credits to tax deferral programs and freezes. Many of these are local options, others not. Of course, giving a break to one group just shifts the tax burden to others.

I received mine and it is going up over 1750 each year. that's a lot of money. I'm not counting my cars. For a family that is too much money. Do I have them come out and say yeah your right we did mess up it's actually more. We need Yale to start paying more. What about all the college kids who live here but their cars are registered somewhere else. It's insane how much taxes we pay here in New Haven and Connecticut. For what. You can never get ahead in Connecticut. It's a struggle.

If property values rise in some neighborhoods more than others, then those gentrifying neighborhoods should pay more in taxes, and the other neighborhoods should pay less in taxes.

Nobody complained when this happened in Downtown and East Rock (except a couple of people in East Rock) a few years ago, because the result was that the other 80% of the city got a nice tax cut.

It is only fair that if, say, Fair Haven or Dwight is now gentrifying faster than the rest of New Haven, building owners there see a slight increase whereas the rest of the city gets a tax cut. You might see places like Dwight Street get hit with big tax increases given that part of New Haven is now a “hot” area, but given that the city budget is independent from reassessment, one person’s $100 tax hike always translates to another person’s $100 tax cut.

@1644: Good info and good looking out, Thx.

I ran a quick analysis on the data provided by the city. Here are the highlights.

All Ye. Expect a big tax hike. It will cover the high rate of inflation plus more to get through next year's zero tax hike. Remember, there's never a tax hike in an election year. Forget about all the finagling with mil rates and valuations, it's the dollar amount that counts. I'm not going to be surprised if I'm shelling out 15% more come July. If the downtown restaurants are having a bad time now, it will only get worse. I can hardly afford to eat out anymore.

"The assessed value of properties in poor neighborhoods (Dixwell, the Hill, Newhallville, Fair Haven) increased more than properties in other parts of the city. Owners here will pay significantly more in taxes going forward."

You might want to put this in context. Those "poor" areas saw a huge drop in property values after the Great Recession, leading to very large property tax cuts in some of those areas over the past decade. The stable neighborhoods like East Rock are the ones that generally saw large tax hikes, because homeowners in the rest of the city were experiencing deep losses.

If property values in areas like Newhallville have finally come back up to where they were prior to the Great Recession, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Does it mean the tax burden will be shifted around so that homeowners in Newhallville now have to go back to paying what they were paying prior to 2010 or so? Maybe, but that's how reval works. Everyone pays their fair share.

The mill rate drop should be dramatic indeed. Average Taxpayers math is right, although it took me a second to see why. A 32% increase in the Grand List would imply that tax revenue increases by 1.32 times (holding the mill rate fixed). To offset this, you could decrease the mill rate by a proportion equal to (1/1.32) = 0.76. So, a 24% decrease in the mill rate would hold tax revenue constant. The current mill rate is 43.88 so the "revenue constant" mill rate is now 0.76*43.88 = 33.24.

And then, as Average Taxpayer says, that rate goes up to the degree that the city needs new revenue to offset inflation, which is pretty high at the moment.

anonymous - I don't have the 2010 data to perform that analysis. And I don't disagree with what you are saying. I do believe that for years, the East Rock, Westville and Morris Cove neighborhoods have incurred a disproportionate share of the tax burden. That has changed as private investors have bought up multi-family properties in the low-income neighborhoods, thereby driving up property values and rents.

Anonymous, I attended a neighborhood meeting following that reval. Then-mayor Destefano said that the good news was that property values in East Rock had been pretty steady. He said that the bad news was that values almost everywhere else had tanked and our taxes were going up. He was right.

Alluneedtoknow, no one in New Haven has received their tax bill yet. The mill rate will undoubtedly go down. The extent to which it does will determine whether your taxes go up, down, or remain the same.

Robn, Alex Pullen is correct. The mill rate is city expenditures, minus non-tax revenues such as state grants, divided by the taxable grand list. Your tax bill (excluding any exemptions that might apply) equals the mill rate times the assessed value of your property.

I appreciate Mr. Pullen’s response to Tom’s question. But as he knows, CGS § 12-62a requires that property be assessed at 70% of “present true and actual value” CGS § 12-63 defines this term as being “fair market value” except for property in the 490 program (little if any NH property is in this program). CGS § 12-63b requires the assessor to consider all three valuation methods (income, comparable sales, and cost) in valuing rental properties, other than small owner-occupied buildings. The wide disparity between appraised values and recent sales prices for larger apartment complexes indicates that he placed undue weight on the income method. Appraising necessarily involves making judgment calls, and I am not suggesting malfeasance. But you would expect the prevalence of under-valuations of property sold shortly after reval. to be approximately the same as over-valuations. This was not true for this class of property. And the marked disparity between appraised values and sales prices for this class of property, after accounting for inflation, was obvious last year, before reval was conducted.

well, some of the assessments are correct, and some are not, but by and large, high taxes will destroy New Haven, we hope the Alders will do the right thing and get the mil rate down to 32 or so, otherwise, expect the costs to be eventually passed on to renters, so don't the city comes back crying why the rents are so high, when there is no housing built but taxes go up so dramatically, THERE IS NO OTHER WAY for an owner to pay these taxes but through increased rents, so knock the rate down so there is no massive hikes,

ESBEY put it well and I’m going to reiterate.

Taxpayers should demand a mill rate adjusted downwards to yield last years budget, plus inflation, minus all of the one time Covid stimuli (temp programs and invented positions).

Note that in the parallel article on the Mayor's State of the City he admits we're awash in cash, something in excess of $130M, it seems, or about a third of our City budget. So when we talk about tax bills, all other things being equal, we should be seeing a significant decrease. That is, unless all our political leadership is interested in is more "programs".

Cut the spending, return the money!

Esbey and Robn are right. Mill rates need to go down. And even if they do, some of us will still face tax increases. My house in Fair Haven went up 67%!! My salary did not.

Responding to some of the comments regarding disproportionate share of property taxes, this is what i found in the Residential Assessment data posted in December.

Out of 30 neighborhoods named in the document, the 3 neighborhoods of Wooster Square, East Rock and Prospect Hill equal 23% of the total assessments, despite being only 11% of the properties.
Add in a few other slightly higher taxation neighborhoods (Ambrose Grove, Science Park, West Forest) and they equal 34% of assessments despite being only 20% of the properties.

All other neighborhoods (who have my sympathies because they are perceiving the increase that was sure to follow decades of market suppressed value) are still a 1:1 or less ratio of assessment % to property %.

Two items.

First, it is not clear that everyone in a gentrified neighborhood should bear the burden of a tax hike. It really is too bad we don't have something more discriminating than property taxation by mill rate. While recent, tacitly moneyed, buyers should indeed bear that higher tax rate, why should the long-term homeowner who did little more more than stumble into the right place at the right time, albeit 10-30 years later? This is how you end up with poorer homeowners being forced to sell, even if what they want is not the cash value of their home but just to stay where they are. This drag-along effect of property revaluations (both up and down) is what makes property taxes among the worst taxation systems imaginable.

Second, this article notes that the "value" of grand list grew. But it does not indicate if the "grand list" itself grew. I'm not sure what that metric is: acreage, square footage, whatever. We've seen a spate of building. That suggests a per capita increase in taxable square footage. So how great has been that growth? Has that changed proportionally in ratio to the non-taxable square footage? What portion of the this reval total is attributable to just a shift in value as opposed to the addition of new, taxable footage to properties/sites? It would be worth digging out those numbers since ideally if the total amount of taxable footage had grown in the city, that would represent a true revenue upside rather than just the market inflation consequent on a momentarily "hot" market that, in a sudden housing recession, could see all of us [choose your swear word].

Second