By Polly Mikula
The Killington Select Board was informed by town lister Butch Findeisen Monday, April 28, that the state-mandated reappraisal of its Grand List would not, in fact, be happening this year as scheduled.
The third party-contractor, Vision, who the town hired to do the work, was not able to complete its evaluations on the town’s residential properties by March as was required in time for the first tax bills to be sent out in July. In fact, the company indicated on its last bill that it was only 25% complete with the residential evaluation, Findeisen told the board.
“During our discussion last week [with appraisers] it came to our attention that Vision was not ready to get everything to us on time so that we can do all that we’re supposed to do,” Findeisen said.
Once the listers receive the evaluations of residential properties from Vision, they will review them to be sure there were no mistakes, which is expected to take three or four weeks.
Then the preliminary assessments get mailed out and the listers planned to “hold hearings — not official grievance, but a time which people could come in and talk to us about their specific property for a better understanding of the value and how it came about.”
Then there’s the official grievance period, which is typically the end of May, Findeisen said. Final tax bills go out in early July.
“So we don’t have much time. [Vision] should have given us everything back in late February or early March,” Findeisen summarized. “So I talked to the state and we can push off our finish date to next year, the next tax season, we just have to do it with the approval of the Select Board. So we’re here asking for that,” he concluded.
Select Board member Patrick Cushing asked how the delay would affect the town’s CLA and tax bills.
Findisean answered, “Our CLA is roughly 48%, but because the state is doing this new math where instead of 100% being 100% it’s now 73%, which brings our CLA up to 63%, but all that shouldn’t affect our tax bills a lot unless the state does something else crazy with rates… there’s even a chance this year our taxes could go down, but you didn’t hear that from me,” he said.
The board basically concluded that there wasn’t much they could do about it at this point.
“To me, I feel like maybe we should have been on them a litte harder. With the TIF in the reappraisal there would have been increment up there so we’re losing one of the years since the start of the TIF in 2022. There are 10 years when you can accrue debt and then 20 years after that of capturing increment. So if this reappraisal should have been, I’m thinking we’re out six figures … the town is losing out a lot because they’re not fulfilling their contract which said the work was to be completed this year. That being said, we need to approve this work.”
The board unanimously approved the year extension.
“I think if we give them more time they’ll do a better job and we’ll have plenty of time to review their work,” Findeisen added.
