Wicked Straight Talk on Property Taxes

As Plymouth's home town newspaper, the Old Colony Memorial usually does a good job of reporting on local government affairs. But in its December 5th front page ARTICLE concerning Plymouth's new property tax rate, many residents were scratching their heads trying to make sense out of the article.

While the headline accurately reports that the tax rate has been increased by $1.35 to $12.42, the sub-head statement that the Average tax bill will increase by $125 is impossible to verify with the information provided.

First of all, the $125 increase refers to the average residential tax bill. If we use the new average assessed value of $314,154 and apply the new tax rate of $12.42, we get the new average tax bill of $3,901.79. Trust me on this, I was a math major.

We know, from the body of the article, that this amount is $125.12 (not the $125 mentioned in the sub-head) higher than last year's average, or $3,776.67. Dividing last year's average by last years tax rate tells us that last year's average assessed value was $341,163.

Put another way, the tax rate has increased by 12.2% while the Average assessed value has declined by 7.92% resulting in a net increase of 3.31%. Once again, this applies only to residential property.

So, now we know what the tax rate is, but we must wait for the arrival of our tax bills to tell us the full story. Depending upon how your property's assessed value this year compares to last year, you could see a wide range of results. While it can be painful to watch the value of your home decline, it can be even more painful if your assessment is not adjusted accordingly and your tax bill shows a big increase.

It's hard enough to deal with tax issues when we are provided with the facts. This article clearly fell short. And while there is no reason to believe that the OCM has any reason to cloud the issue, they either were only given part of the story, or garbled the information they were given. Either way, the clarification provided by Emily Wilcox that can be found well down in the comments section of the on-line copy of the article, should have been published prominently in today's (hard copy)edition.