HOULTON, Maine — Property taxes will not be going up this year, thanks to some creativity from the town council and assessor’s office.
According to Laureen Bither, tax assessor for the town of Houlton, the mill rate for 2017 was set at 22.25, the same as it was in 2016.
“It is always the goal to try and hold the mill rate the same,” explained Bither. “We know that is what the council hopes we are able to do.”
In order to keep the town’s tax rate at last year’s level, councilors agreed on July 24 to adjust the amount of money they set aside in the Houlton International Airport tax increment financing district. The town has reduced the amount of money going into the airport TIF district for the past couple of years in order to use some of those funds to reduce the tax burden.
A TIF district is a financing method that allows a municipality to re-direct tax dollars for development, infrastructure, and other community-improvement projects in designated accounts.
“If we had left that amount [at 100 percent], we would have been short $175,600 [in the 2017 budget],” Bither explained. “The only thing that worked was if we reduced the funds going into the airport TIF district down to 2 percent. By doing this, we are able to hold the mill rate.”
By reducing that amount and keeping the mill rate steady, the town’s overlay — the amount of money it projects to have leftover at the end of the fiscal year — will only be $2,500, Bither said.
“This year is going to be extremely tight,” she said. “We will have to keep an extremely close watch on the budget because that is not very much of an overlay.”
Bither said the only other options would be for the town to raise the mill rate to 23 mills or to pull money out of the undesignated (surplus) fund to cover the shortage. She added that she, Town Manager Butch Asselin, Town Clerk Cathy O’Leary, Treasurer Lindsay Stewart, and Tax Collector Lauren Asselin all discussed which option the town should pursue and the consensus was to reduce the TIF funds.
One of the items affecting the budget was the state’s decision to raise the Homestead Exemption to $20,000 — up from $15,000 a year ago. Raising that exemption essentially reduced the amount of tax revenues coming into the town, Bither said.
“The reimbursement from the state for that revenue loss was originally supposed to be 62.5 percent, but with the changes made to the state budget, that figure was reduced to 50 percent,” she said.
That one change, cost the town of Houlton $73,000 in lost revenues, Bither said. She added that over the past five years, the town has lost $381,656 in state funding through changes to revenue sharing and other programs.
Town councilors approved a 2017 municipal budget in the amount of $10,690,001 back on Jan. 4. That figure is up slightly from last year’s budget of $10,575,166. The budget included a 2 percent cost of living wage increase for all union employees, but non-union staff members, which includes most department heads, only received a 1 percent pay increase.
