Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Warren, and there are many No? Many parcels that don't have a tax. I sent you an email last year. Yeah. We'll talk. Okay. Something about a nineteen thirties or forties camp thing that's never been built, but people own all these tiny little parcels. Oh. And the overdue tax, it's never meet, so they can't be sold and they can't be used. And there's Wow. Okay. Okay? Think the only thing I could say would you contact Yeah. Get Warren and figure out what's going on. So it's delinquent tax? It's delinquent taxes, and it's the size of the parcels. And I'm not sure what to do, but if you can help us figure that out, I've asked for their suggestions. They just don't have any either, but I know we're not gonna lower that back down to where you could foreclose for a $200 old tax pay. Yeah. There were some changes to that recently. Last year. Yeah. Because of the fear that people could be made homeless for a minimal, any amount actually of overdue taxes could change into tax sales. Yeah, they've got some Chris Ruth seemed to know about it, but

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: Yeah. I'm not as well versed in the life of taxes, but I can

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: say Yeah. But I just you can help me think through what to do about it. I would much appreciate it because they are on top of it. K. Okay. So now we're going back to wetlands. And on both of these bills, think we're just trying to figure out what's possible, what's good policy. I assume we already count wetlands in when a parcel is appraised, but Oh gosh. Yeah. Alright. So we'll start

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: with S 165. So my name is Jill Remick. I'm the director of property evaluation and review at the tax department. Haven't actually been here in this this winter yet.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Yeah. This whole Don't worry. Are you still And

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: I brought you credit, because I brought some hard copy annual reports that I hadn't brought over to

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: you all yet. Did feel bad you're still interested.

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: So S-one 165 is proposing to require an assessing official to take into account wetland identification for evaluation. The language that's proposed is almost word for word, but actually it's already in statute. So the statute requires that fair market value that the listeners and assessors are establishing include the effect of any state or local law or regulation affecting the use of the land, including Title X, and so on and so forth. So this is sort of why you have listeners and assessors actually set the value, because they do have the capacity, like research things, like zoning, or transportation even, or wetland identification. Definitely. So the only caveat, and this would be true regardless, is if you have 100 acres and you have a fifth of an acre that's wetland, that may not change your property value very much. But that is something that listeners take into account and do this work already, so I don't think that this language is necessary. We also cover it in our Lister Handbook and we do our annual training for Lister Center. This is one of the many things that have to be taken into account. Highest and best use.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Highest and best use for wetlands is?

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: Land, no. Okay. And also, if the concern was about a landowner not disagreeing with the value or something like that, then landowners have the ability to appeal. That's kind of the main way that property evaluation works, is there's a first step of an appeal at the lister or assessor level. You can then appeal to the Board of Civil Authority and then on to the Property Valuation Review Department, hearing officers, or superior courts. So there are avenues by which if landowner's not satisfied if property is disvalued or don't think it was done correctly, that they should agree to that, not exist.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Unless this committee wants to continue to paint this out of the dumpster.

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: I mean, good news, right? It's already covered. And then S-three 14 is directing the Current Use Advisory Board to recommend that land that's posted pay an annual surcharge. So, the Current Use Advisory Board has the responsibility of setting the current use values each year, and they certainly do make legislative recommendations, but this felt sort of like a strange roundabout way to request something.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Yeah. I guess, he ish, who is, about, said it with who we Right. And a constituent who has a neighbor who posted all their land in current use value felt that if in fact all of us are sharing and paying the additional taxes on that property that it shouldn't there should be some limit to removing it from public use. I guess the first question that came to my mind is, is it just your constituent's neighbor or is a lot of that land posted, which would make the difference if it's worth passing a law? I heard in the hallway that a lot of it was posted, but we but that the town clerks are the only ones who know what's posted. You know what's in land use. They know what's posted. And we've got a couple things here like a second home tax that is going to stress out our local listeners and clerk somewhat, and I'm a little weary of overstressing them and wondering how big a deal would it be to find out how much of this land is posted. Just

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: Yeah. Right now, the current use program has no we don't have anything to do with posting. We don't wanna know. We don't have any way to track it. This comes up a lot. I feel like every year there's sort of this conversation I've with that

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: never seen it built. Yeah, and

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: it didn't look like this. There's a few things, right? So first of all, we do not want the administrative responsibility of tracking posting land necessarily, but the way that this is sort of constructed is sort of how do you bill this surcharge? Who would collect it, when would they collect it? That has been correct. What about persons that are enrolled? So that's where we sort of looked at it was from the administrative perspective, but then there's a policy about enrolled parcels and posting land that while we don't have a position, certainly over the years we've heard a lot of what seem like pretty reasonable explanations, like perhaps you have a deaf child, perhaps you run a child care center, perhaps you have valuable livestock. Right? That's that's a very separate policy.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Posted our land. Yeah. I don't have 30 acres, but if I did, because of the canopy, you're not supposed to shoot the city of Montpelier, but the ridge runs into Berlin, farm on the other side of the ridge is in Berlin, and hunters sometimes move the timeline as they talk about their homes and they come in. They can't see that there are residential homes and children and dogs that could look like deer hanging out the backyard, and bullets have gone through the backyard. The police have come out more than once. And I don't wanna prohibit someone from protecting. Oh, you're talking. And there's this assumption of logic too if you own 500 acres. Why would you host it other than you just it's yours, then you can. It's yours. Right.

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: And so the other component is there's sort of that 10% impact, so this is, the way it's written right now is that it's actually an enrollment requirement, so now we're talking about how would we enforce this, how would we track this. It adds a layer of complexity and tracking and collections that we do not currently have. And I think if it was put on the clerk, which it's true that right now posting has to be recorded annually at the town level, and the surcharge is collected at that point, then And the cash

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: to collect the money, keep it, send it in to somebody, and every year notify you if there's been any change in posting. Right? Which what if you forget on January 1 to post your land? Can you not remember to post that you're posting it and post it February 1?

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: We also already have this annual agriculture certification, which is like 8,000 parcels every year that we're sending out, requiring folks to certify, sending back. I mean, of these things sort of add room for error on the landowner part and add a lot of burden

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: that take away from our ability to administer the program. How do do that? Okay. And as we heard this morning with the early child teacher, that's starting to require a lot of money Right. Yeah. To administer Uh-huh. Which is not making the people across the hall happy because there is an extra money. So okay. Yeah. I can see that this alright. Committee. Questions? Thoughts?

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: None. My thought is that there are multiple bills in other committees that have jurisdiction over posting, planned posting that are taking those issues up. I think a health committee is actually moving forward with a bill and then the Senate Senate Committee, which Scott and I serve on, have a bill that Senator Mattos, and then also, you have a bill. So, I just think that we don't want to talk about posting in this committee and tell some, that kid committees of jurisdiction send us something. And this seems to not logistically make sense considering all the other things that are in play. Okay.

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: We are rapidly running through our list of bills up there and deciding to take no action. Which is fine because I did talk to a house member who does want to look at the tax brackets and I want to look at the tax brackets mostly where our top bracket starts which is quite low and we have low income as the definition of welding goes and may well be discouraging us from being able to attract or hold the kinds of professionals like doctors, like IR, those, maybe RN, all business leaders that want to. So I think we spend some time from that instead of posting. I did try and pass this off.

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: We tried to send it

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: I tried to send it to because I didn't want it. Oh. Because I was the first told that where it was. Oh, but I'm glad that she would like it. And Jill, if you could talk to Warren and see if you could So

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: the town clerk in Warren?

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a gentleman from the plan, making the town planner. And his first name is Jim, and I'm not remembering the last name, but they do seem to have a special kind of situation over there with little What? Should we go off live? If we could go off

[Jill Remick, Director of Property Valuation and Review, Vermont Department of Taxes]: live,

[Sen. Ann Cummings (Chair)]: we