To The Editor:
Tax increases: Waitsfield: 39.8%, Warren: 40.4 %, Fayston: 33.4%, Moretown:30.5% -- just so we all know clearly: those are the tax increases if the HUUSD proposed budget passes on Town Meeting Day. Given the damage those hikes will inflict on too many, the only word for them is obscene. Having lived and owned property in Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, and Vermont, I have never seen anything remotely like this. (For the record, we already pay more taxes than any state except New York, Connecticut, and Hawaii.) Look, my kids went to Harwood. I get the needs. Nobody wants to deny essential improvements. But when did any of us ever get a 40% raise? Never, right? Too many folks already are just squeaking by, having to choose between paying taxes and providing food, heat, medical care, kids’ clothes, etc.
Too many older folks on fixed incomes can’t even make that choice. What about young people just starting out? Those are not fictitious. I know people in every case. I’ll bet you do, too. So where are those new taxes going to come from? Savings accounts. Retirement funds. Rainy day funds. College funds. If you have them. What if you don’t and just cannot, no way no how, pay the taxes? Option 1: the town takes your home for unpaid tax. Option 2: sell out and go. There is no excuse, no rationale, no need extreme enough to justify taxes which do that. Here are the hard facts. The school board tried recently to pass an unacceptable budget and it got slapped down. There should have been a lesson in that. For 20 years legislators have failed to fix a disastrous education funding system. State officials sit on their hands and do nothing. School boards compound those failures with intolerable budgets like this one. It all rolls down on us poor suckers with no say, no power, no alternative. Except voting down budgets we can’t afford. That is our last resort that they cannot take away. Please vote no to avoid intolerable tax increases for FY25.
Jim Tabor
Waitsfield
