WEST SPRINGFIELD — As communities are required to do each fiscal year, the West Springfield Town Council conducted a tax classification hearing and set the residential factor as 0.7646 for fiscal year 2026 during its Nov. 17 meeting.
Combining an overall tax increase of 3.5% with the residential factor, residents should expect an average property tax increase of about $172 in FY26.
At Large Councilor Jaime Smith explained that as a result of the Budget Subcommittee meetings, the town’s assessed values for properties has gone up by just under 10%.
“We recognized that assessed values, the median, it’s gone up. Recognizing it for residential as well as commercial, it’s gone up 9.82% in one year, so with that said, we thought it in the Budget Subcommittee it was an agreeable amount to increase it by 3.5%, not the median of the 9.82,” she said.
At Large Councilor Brian Griffin explained that the FY26 residential tax shift would be similar to the tax shift from FY25.
“We have an overall tax increase of 3.5% that we’re going to distribute. If we took last year’s tax rate at 1.60, it would be an increase of somewhere around $208 per average family. When I say last year’s tax rate, it would be the same residential tax shift as last year,” he said. “This would equate to your average family residential tax bill an increase of $172, which is $43 a quarter, so it’s very similar to last year’s tax shift as well, as far as monetary goes.”
Griffin explained that increasing taxes at the rate property values went up would have a negative impact on locally owned businesses.
“While we’ve had increases in our values at 9.82%, what we did in the budget subcommittee is we took into consideration some of the mom and pops that would not see a significant increase, that was very important to the members of the council. This was a way to not go to that 9.82% that would have hurt them,” he said. “We certainly like that our values have gone up and will continue to go up, we thought a lot about that and took it into consideration for this.”
Griffin added that the proposed tax shift was “the best scenario for everybody.”
“It is very important to elaborate on it because traditionally, we don’t go to the levy limit, the levy limit is an additional $10 million we could tax, but we’re not doing that this year,” he said. “We don’t need to tax for that $10 million, so there’s no reason to do that.”
The council unanimously approved the residential tax factor of 0.7646.
During the meeting, the council also approved the placement of a utility pole on Prospect Avenue that will be jointly owned by Eversource and Verizon.
The West Springfield Town Council next meets in December.
