April 5, 2023 By Advisory Commitee Chair George Danis
I have been aware of some confusion over the tax impact chart in the Town Meeting warrant and in the related Hingham Anchor article and welcome the opportunity to provide some clarification.
First, the chart was designed to show a 5-year projection of estimated taxes related to the Foster School/ Public Safety Building projects and the override vote. The idea was to show taxes for these two items separately so residents could see how each would affect their tax bills.
We understood that taxes on the two building projects increase annually until FY 29, when they start to decline, and prepared this chart to show residents that information. The chart was not designed to present the overall annual increase in taxes from all sources although, in hindsight, the inclusion of that data would be helpful.
In order to calculate the estimated annual increase in taxes from the chart we need to compare the “estimated tax bill with override” line for consecutive years and show the result as a percentage.
If the override passes, the FY 24 tax increase is 13.8% since this would be the first year that the override and the Foster/ Public Safety Buildings tax increases are added to the overall tax bill.
Thereafter, the annual increase in the override tax is limited to that allowed under Proposition 2-½ plus the town Community Preservation Act surcharge. The impact of that is illustrated in the chart below, which shows the annual tax increase dropping to 4.0% in FY 25; 4.7% in FY 26; 3.6% in FY 27 and 3.4% in FY 28.
