When Harvard property owners open their third-quarter tax bills in January they’ll find the amount they owe has increased as the newly calculated fiscal 2019 tax rate takes effect.
On Tuesday David Manzello of the Regional Resource Group, Harvard’s regional assessor, reported to the Select Board that this year’s tax rate will increase from $17.15 per thousand dollars of a property’s assessed value to an estimated $17.42. As a result, the owner of an average single-family home in Harvard valued at $629,200 can expect to see an increase of 1.6 percent in this fiscal year’s tax bill, rising from $10,790 to an estimated $10,970. Manzello said the value of a single-family home remained “essentially flat,” as did the value of commercial properties. The average value of condominiums jumped 12.5 percent, though the amount of increase “varied from complex to complex,” he said, while vacant land increased by roughly 5 percent. To estimate your own fiscal 2019 tax, see below.
Property taxes are the primary means by which Harvard raises the money it needs to pay for schools, police, fire, ambulance, and other town services. Taxes also pay principal and interest on outstanding debt. Owners of the town’s 1,688 single-family homes pay 95 percent of the town’s property taxes. At its Tuesday meeting, the Select Board voted unanimously to apply the same $17.42 rate to the commercial and industrial properties in town, as well as to personal property.
The total amount town government needs in any year is determined by the size of the budget approved by Annual Town Meeting, minus the revenue it receives from the state and from motor vehicle excise taxes and other local fees. The total amount required of taxpayers for fiscal 2019, which began July 1, 2018, is approximately $21,343,838, a 2.3 percent increase over fiscal 2018. The maximum amount the town can raise in any given year, known as the levy limit (or maximum allowable levy), is determined by adding 2.5 percent to the previous year’s levy limit plus the value of newly taxable properties and any debt payments the town has agreed to exclude from the maximum amount permitted by Proposition 2½. This year’s levy is $6,014 less than the $21,349,852 allowed and marks the third consecutive year the town has not used all of its available levy.
Unused levy is not to be confused with free cash (available funds); free cash is money appropriated by Annual Town Meeting but left unspent at the end of the fiscal year. And as assessor Manzello pointed out at this week’s Select Board meeting, none of these numbers can be regarded as official until the Massachusetts Department of Revenue approves them.
How to estimate your own tax bill
Your fiscal 2019 property tax is the sum of two numbers: your real estate tax and a Community Preservation Act (CPA) surcharge that deposits money in Harvard’s Community Preservation Fund.
To estimate your own tax, multiply the most recently assessed value of your property by $17.42 and write down the result. Now multiply the assessed value of your property by 1.1 percent (0.011), the CPA surcharge. Add the two numbers together. The sum is your total estimated tax.
The final amount, however, won’t be known until the state Department of Revenue does its own calculations and approves the rate recommended by Harvard’s Board of Assessors.
