WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The median property tax bill for fiscal year 2025 is expected to see its lowest year-to-year increase since 2019, the Select Board learned on Monday night.

 

Assessor Christopher Lamarre laid out the tax ramifications of the FY25 town budget at the board's annual tax classification hearing.

 

The tax levy, the total property tax collected by the town, is up just 1.3 percent from FY24. The levy is what the town needs to raise to cover the budget approved at the spring's annual town meeting.

 

In FY24, the fiscal year that ended on June 30, the levy was $20.3 million; for FY25, that number is up to $20.6 million, the smallest year-to-year increase since 2021, when it rose by just .02 percent from the year before.

 

The last three fiscal years, the levy rose by 3.6 percent (FY22), 4.35 percent (FY23) and 4.11 percent (FY24).

 

The 1.3 percent increase for the fiscal year that began on July 1 will be generated largely from an increase in the town's property value.

 

The anticipated tax rate for town appropriations (which needs to be certified by the Department of Revenue) is $13.80 per $1,000 of assessed value, the fourth straight year the tax rate has gone down and a drop of $1.35 from the FY24 tax rate of $15.15/$1,000.

 

Despite the drop in rate, tax bills will go up for most property owners — just not as much as in recent years.

 

That is because the median value of a single family home — the point at which half the homes in town are assessed higher and half are assessed lower — is $439,100 in FY25, a jump of $44,000, or 11.1 percent, from the median assessed value of $395,100 in FY24.

 

The tax bill on that hypothetical median assessed home is expected to be $6,060, or $74 more than last year's $5,986 tax bill — an increase of 1.2 percent. Six years ago, in FY19, the median tax bill went up by $31 from the year before.

 

Part of the difference between the rise in the levy (1.3 percent) and the rise in the median tax bill (1.2 percent) is due to new growth in the tax base.

 

Home construction, renovations, etc., accounted for a $17.8 million increase in the town's tax base and $266,793 in new tax revenue from FY24 to FY25, according to numbers Lamarre presented on Monday.

 

The total FY25 tax base is $1.5 billion (residential, commercial, industrial and personal property). Counting new growth and reassessments, that's an increase of $151 million, or 11.2 percent, from FY24.

 

"That's a big number," Lamarre said of the total tax base. "Those increases came about as a result of the sale prices outstripping the assessed values [from prior years]. We're required by the commonwealth to do an assessment to sale ratio study, where we compare the sale prices to the assessed values.

 

"If folks follow sale prices of homes in this community, a lot of them raise eyebrows when the sale prices come through, and they do with me, too. When that happens, we have to adjust what is called the cost tables in our assessing system. Those cost tables have to be adjusted so that the median assessment is within 90 percent of the median sale price of a particular class of property. In other words, if things are selling for $100,000, and I determine the assessment is $80,000, I have to adjust the cost table so the assessment goes up to at least $90,000 but not more than $110,000."

 

As always, the tax rate is determined by relatively simple math — factoring the size of the levy against the size of the tax base to determine what percentage of property value owners must pay so the town can pay its bills.

 

The modest increase in the levy from FY24 to FY25 is the result of a push by elected officials last winter to control costs.

 

"Thank you to [Town Manager Robert Menicocci] and the Fin Comm for keeping things as flat as possible," said Select Board member Randal Fippinger, who attended last winter and spring's Finance Committee meetings as an observer.

 

Another piece of good news for the town to come out of Monday's report was the status of the town's excess levy capacity, the difference between what it collects in property taxes in a given year and what it could collect without needing a Proposition 2 1/2 override like the one that failed in Cheshire on Monday as the Williamstown board sat.

 

The excess capacity stands at just more than $3.3 million for FY25, Lamarre reported.

 

"A lot of towns have no levy capacity," said Select Board member Andrew Hogeland, who also has served as president of the Massachusetts Select Board Association. "I'm not urging that we spend it, but it's remarkable that we have that capacity if we need it."

 

The business for the Select Board at the classification hearing — besides hearing a report on the town's FY25 financials — was to make decisions on whether to use four mechanisms the state allows to redistribute the tax levy: the open space discount, residential exemption, small commercial exemption and splitting the tax rate between residential and commercial properties.

 

As it has traditionally, the Select Board opted against all four of those mechanisms, this year with no discussion. Last year, Stephanie Boyd argued that the residential exemption, in particular, would be a way to make property taxation slightly less regressive for the town.

 

In other business on Monday, the Select Board:

 

Decided that it will appoint a volunteer to serve in a seat being vacated by Hogeland until the final year of his term can be decided at May's annual town election.

 

Heard from Hogeland that he continues to seek clarity from state officials about whether the town needs signoff from Boston to allow off-leash dog areas in the Spruces Park — which includes priority habitats designated by MassWildlife's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program.

 

And decided not to address concerns in the "guidebook" the board drafted in 2021 and, instead, replace it on the town's website with links to the handbook drafted by the Massachusetts Municipal Association.