WEST SPRINGFIELD — During the Nov. 18 Town Council meeting, the council hosted a tax classification hearing and approved a Commercial Industrial Personal Property factor of 1.568 for fiscal year 2025.
The shift factor will increase the residential tax rate to $14.87 and the commercial tax rate to $30.28.
This will result in an increase of 3.57% for the average residential tax bill and 7.29% for the median commercial tax bill.
The tax rates for 2024 were a residential tax rate of $14.81and a commercial tax rate of $29.80.
Town Council President Sean Powers opened up the discussion at the Town Council meeting because he said there was no set factor that the subcommittee unanimously agreed upon before the meeting.
Town Council member Anthony DiStefano gave a summary of the subcommittee meeting before the council discussed the tax rate and residential factor further.
DiStefano said the group discussed the tax rate and shift data provided by West Springfield Chief Financial Officer Sharon Wilcox.
Wilcox said that FY25 represents an interim valuation year for West Springfield property valuation. A certification review is conducted by the Bureau of Local Assessment every five years, with the most recent certification year being FY22.
DiStefano moved to approve the new shift factor and explained, “What in essence this shift factor would mean for next fiscal year based on, or for this fiscal year, and based upon the valuation increase that we saw in property, both residential, commercial, industrial, would be, currently it’s 14.81 cents of a residential rate that would go to $14.87 cents of a residential rate and a commercial industrial rate of $29.80 to a rate of $30.28.
Councilor Frederick Connor talked more about the problems he and the subcommittee had when trying to come to a unanimous decision for the tax rate and shift factor.
He said, “With the tax burden that we have, it doesn’t give us much room to maneuver and it was much ringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in these session about what to do. We’d love to ease the burden for the residential and also be mindful of the commercial as well and helping them because the commercial really spans a spectrum of the big box stores to the mom and pop stores and everything in between.”
Although the proportional split will remain the same last year, increases in the town budget and in property values led to the tax rate itself going down, but annual tax bills increasing.
The average single family home value is $327,419, an increase of 3.15% from the 2024 average single family home value of $317,418.
Frederick also discussed other possibilities the subcommittee looked into.
He explained, “I was interested in looking into perhaps, well of couple of us here on the council were discussing perhaps the option or possibility of splitting these commercial and revenue categories to maybe help those that would be hurt the most at the mom and pop level but we were advised that that’s not a possibility. It was not legal to do that, so we don’t have a lot of room to wiggle in. Given the deliberations of the council at our meeting and with Sharon Wilcox our Chief Financial Officer and Alex Villar, present in assessor’s office, I think we did the best we could making a recommendation.”
Councilor Daniel O’Brien chimed in and said that the reason the shift factor and tax rate increased a little was due to the budget.
“As I said last spring, when the room was full, and we were bombarded with budget increases that none of those same people would be here when the time came to pay the bill, and I was correct so I’m right twice a year apparently. We did discuss trying to absorb the residential but then that pushes everything on to the businesses who are also in a difficult spot. My final word is this is a budgetary problem, the reason that the taxes have to go up is because the budget went up so bare that in mind when we start the budget cycle again that our job as city councilors is to try to pare down the budget so that when we’re sitting in the empty room next fall, we can give news to everybody where we can lower taxes for business and residential,” he said.
Brian Griffin said one of the good things the Town Council continue to do is stay away from maximum shift factor and stay off ‘that last page our document’ and away from being one of the highest commercial rate performers.
The new factor shift was approved unanimously by the Town Council.
