By Meredith McCulloch
The most recent tax bill may have surprised some residents when it arrived around the beginning of the year. For most homeowners, the bill is higher due to several factors.
The Rate: The tax rate per $1,000 evaluation is higher. When the Assessors set the tax rates in November, the residential rates rose by 6.3%. The new residential rate is $15.71 per $1,000 evaluation, up from $15.37 last year. This increase is required to support the budgets approved by residents at Town Meetings in March and November.
Property Evaluation: Individual bills are impacted by any change in value of that home and by the overall evaluation of the properties in town. If home values overall rise, but a specific home goes down in value, the tax on that property may decrease. However, the average value of a single-family home has risen by about $20,000 over the last year, from $518,100 to $538,600.
Compensating for estimated bills: The town’s fiscal year begins July 1 and taxes are due quarterly. The first two tax bills in August and November are conservative estimates of the quarterly bill. By the time the February and May bills are calculated, the annual tax bill is firm, so the third and fourth payments are often higher to offset the previous lower estimates.
For more details and charts, see the Assessor’s website:
https://www.bedfordma.gov/sites/bedfordma/files/file/file/tax_changes.20131229.pdf
Also see previous article in The Bedford Citizen:
https://thebedfordcitizen.org/2013/11/26/tax-rate-to-rise-6-3-on-average-tax-classification-remains-the-same/
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The town and its various comittees are busy spending hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on ‘studys’ how to spend millions more. They also add a surcharge to the property taxes to pay for personal pet projects.
Then they spend more tax dollars to build plenty of affordable housing for people that are not from Bedford.
And in that process, long term residents are being priced out of their homes due to excesively high property taxes.