To the Editor,
Much has been and will be written about M&E town budgeting and taxes. Property owners will weigh the costs and benefits of all public departments as Town Meetings approach, with a likely focus on the pain of rising tax rates, and particular concern for the School District’s budget increase. I want, further on, to try to place our tax burden in some perspective. I’ll not dwell at length on the merits of our school system, which I think is quite good. As regards this year’s District budget, the one particular that stands out is insurance and other benefits, whose increase of $1,375,131 is 60% of the overall bump for the schools. A hard nut indeed. So, this year’s budgetary pressures do not arise from particular class offerings as has been suggested, but primarily from a 27% increase in health insurance premiums, for which the school committee has been unable to find suitable, less costly alternatives. One might hope for a national healthcare policy to check these rising costs, but the tide appears to be running strongly against this idea.
As for the burden of our residential property taxes, there are lots of relevant data on the Massachusetts Dept. of Revenue, Division of Local Services website, including averages of single-family tax bills, family income, and property tax bills as a percentage of family income, for all 351 cities and towns in the State. So, I dove into these data to see where Manchester and Essex fall in, in terms of average household tax bills and the burden as a percentage of household income. (NOTE: using the most recent data, for 2024.) Statewide, the average annual tax bill by municipality runs from $1,027 (Hancock) to $25,464 (Weston), and the household tax burden runs from 4.1% (Rowe) to 40.7% (Amherst). Plainly, there are lots of confounding local factors like size of community, makeup of the school systems, income levels, nature of the housing stock, and locality (east MA vs. west MA, Cape and Islands, etc.).
So, I selected a more focused subset of towns:
1) in the eastern part of the State defined roughly by the I-495 belt; and
2) with fewer than 6,000 single family housing units, resulting in a data set of 109 towns.
Manchester and Essex are on the small end of this spectrum with 1,611 and 1,002 units, respectively. The findings for residential properties:
Average tax bill in Manchester is $15,649, 17th highest in the State and the 10th highest out of the 109 towns in the selected subset.
Average tax bill in Essex is $11,352, 44th highest in the State and the 28th highest in the selected subset.
In the subset of selected east MA towns, the average household tax burden (property tax as a percentage of family income) runs from 5.1% (Dover) to 19.9% (Amesbury). Essex is at 8.9% and Manchester is at 6.5%, ranking 99th and 106th out of the 109 towns in the subset.
These measures are admittedly rough, especially when considering disparities of income between towns and within towns. For instance, the average tax bill in Dover is $18,563, 9th highest in the State, but their average household burden is only 5.1%, lowest in my subset, because the average household income is $361,388. For comparison, average household income in Essex is $126,695, and in Manchester $240,634. The most obvious and troubling disparity is the tax burden on “house poor” families in our towns, folks below these income averages whose property values and assessments have risen sharply over the years. Probably more than half of our taxpayers can absorb a substantial tax increase (though they might grumble about it), but for some the prospective rise will challenge the household finances.
Our Town Meetings will have difficult budgetary issues to address, the school district most of all, as it takes up more than half of all spending. As painful as those quarterly tax payments are, we should bear in mind that the excellence of our school system is a big piece of the quality of life here and our most important civic responsibility. It appears that we aren’t out of line as measured by property tax burden, at least among our peer communities in eastern Massachusetts; in fact (if you can believe it), our average household burden is well down in the lowest quintile. Sorta good news, but no reason for complacency. Let’s hope that our elected officials, District administrators and the teachers’ union can work together toward finding more cost-effective solutions in the near future.
