Letter writer Samuel Rosenthal (March 12) falls victim to a common misunderstanding about how property tax reassessments work. The goal is fairness, so what is actually being reset is your property’s new valuation relative to all the other new valuations. Following the reassessments, this is done by recalculating the tax rate so that the total amount of taxes collected with the new assessments equals the total collected under the old assessments. Let’s use Mr. Rosenthal’s example to see how this would actually work:

He starts with a current tax rate of $22.31 per $1,000 of assessed valuation, and says if a house currently assessed at $200,000 receives a new assessment of $300,000, the tax bill would rise from $4,462 to $6,993. What’s missing is the resetting of the tax rate. If, for example, the new total of all assessments is 50 percent higher than the old total, then his tax bill would not change at all, since the new rate would be set at $14.87 per $1,000 assessed value. This is the rate that would yield the same total tax collection as the previous total.

The fairness is found in the relative change in valuations from one property to the next. If your property valuation rises more than the average, then your tax will increase, but only to the extent you exceed the average valuation increase. If your new assessment rises less than the average (or even falls), then your tax bill will decrease.

After 15 years, it’s time to reset the fairness.

Daniel Braden
Scarborough