Afternoon. Welcome to the board of assessors meeting on Wednesday, April 30th here at uh 382 North Main Street at 4:30. In attendance today is uh we're missing a board member, board member Hayden Smith, director Diane, and
assistant director uh Carrie Anne. In accordance with MGL chapter 38 section 20, uh we are having our meeting taped by LCAT and we tape our own mil
meetings and there's no one in attendance from the public today. We'll start off with warrant uh and reports of motor vehicle excise abatements from 232425 from March in amount of 14,89897.
So the warrants, we did not have any warrants. Okay, that's what I Yeah, just report. Yes. And we will review the minutes at next meeting from our prior meeting. Um, sorry. Fiscal 25 real estate exempts for March 414 83565 and
CPA [Music] 14836 and that fiscal 25 real estate payment for March in amount of 6,99838 with a CPA of 6381 and we have the LA3 three sales
report for the month of March few more than February and um I don't know the 1.161 uh that was a cash sale. It's right it it
needs some work. Oh, probably a flip or something. And if I'm not mistaken, a buyer when it says LLC, I'm sure I just kind of looked at a couple of them most of them uh are
the assessment is below 0.9. So yeah, the first 81 that's because somebody went in, purchased it, they flipped it. We haven't had it up yet. Yeah, there's an LLC buying it. Yeah. One was a land one had a
builder. Mother-in-law is in there. And the last at the bottom, the 1.3, that's a commercial condo. Condo, commercial condo. Okay. We don't have many in town, but they're out there.
Okay. Any questions? Aiden? No. All right, we're good to go on LA3 sales report. Now, building report for month of March. Building permits report. Any new homes, Diane? Um, oh,
sorry. Three new homes. Three new homes. We do have quite a few new homes that are being single family. Any condos? That one condo. Oh, I was going to say we don't Yeah. One condo. That's new, right? Yeah. Mhm. And I don't know where that is. Um, that
is the new Oakwood subdivision. That's the name of the street, Scarlet Drive. Off of Parker Street, uh, the old Santanelo property. It's, uh, 13 lot subdivision. And then,
first, all right. I did not know that on Parker Street. Okay. Has anyone tried to build an ADU? I haven't heard of it yet, but I Yeah, there's like rumors about it. I turned down an appraisal today for
an ADU. So, I do know in August uh UMass summer school, they are going to have a specialty course on ADU. So I will make sure I attend that just uh for the ADU cuz uh there was a lender
had a question. We consider them single families. We are not we do not consider them to be two family homes. To the best of my knowledge I agree with that statement. We may be finding something
different when the department of revenue is going to give us an overview of the direction. But I believe you have to have a single family home in order to put an additional unit on. So I don't think they'll be calling it multi. I don't know if they're going to have us
coded a 109, which is two houses on one property, right? But for for Fanny May, I should say, is calling him a single family with an accessory. There is a there's a spot on the form that says single and with accessory unit
cuz the lender wanted to order as a two family which they used to do with two properties on one 20 25 years ago but for Fanny May they're single family with an accessory unit as they call it.
Okay, that's it for building reports. Uh building permit report, sorry. a reimbursement submission for fiscal 25. We have some veteran exemptions. Uh so it's not only veteran exemptions. It is um we have to do three different report
submissions. So the first one and you do not need to sign off on it, but just so you are aware, we had 8 22Ds. I can't read the rest of them, but 39
22E and one parah which is a 22F. What is a 22D? Uh surviving spouse. It is a full exemption if the veteran um uh
either passed due to a service connected injury or a service connected disease. and 22E uh that is the 100% disabled veteran. Okay. And the last was the paraplegic. So that's doesn't need to be signed off.
That information automatically when we enter it into the gateway then defaults on the MDM1 and this I would like your signatures on it. Okay. So for the exemptions for all the
clauses it's 179,658 and a penny and the state will reimburse us 141 141,000. Is that an exact percentage they give us? Um or is it individualized
through the classes? So each one they have a specific dollar amount. Oh, they do. Okay. Yeah. last year due to I believe a surplus um halfway through the year they decided to pay us the additional amount but that
was the first time we had ever seen that happen so it's a possibility that they could it's about 20% it looks like overall or 80% they reimbures I should say the other way and then we also get
reimbursed for motor vehicle goal exercise for any veteran who has a uh veterans disability plate or if they're because of the Heroes Act the um 100% disabled veteran or incapable of working
and so we um granted $13,82830 and I would need signature on the front page do they you don't need it on the Munice Yeah, just right there. And that has Yep. And that has
been submitted in. And now we have your signatures on file. All right. And great. Now we have a um director's update. Okay. Um let's see. Right now, I'm currently working on updating personal property
accounts for fiscal 26. Um if we have any new accounts, which we do, they will be visited most likely. It'll happen a little bit um later during the summertime. Uh we do have all of our 50/50 blended value properties. They
have been submitted to us and we will be having our consultant complete them prior to our interim adjustment and he will um provide you with um the way that he arrived at those values. The values for telephone and pipeline will be
provided by the commissioner of revenue and it's generally available June 15th. Uh building permits, we're getting ready to start our building permit inspections. Uh we have approximately
540 open building permits this year. Uh prior to starting our 26 inim adjustment of values, we do need to visit all properties with open permits and then complete the data entry to make sure our property values have been
updated prior to start to work on the interim adjustment. Um as we're doing that, that's how we'll be determining our new growth for fiscal 26. And generally we try to have our data collector out
during the month of June. It could even be at the end of May. We like it as close to June 30th as possible so we can pick up the full um amount of new growth. The fiscal 26 income and expense
forms were mailed out uh and they are due back by May 15th, which is Thursday. And I encourage commercial um property owners if they haven't submitted it to make sure that they get it submitted as soon as possible. There is a penalty
that is added if they do not file. So nobody wants to have to pay any more than uh what is due. Uh and cyclical inspections we have completed the inspection part of the
program. We did. Wow. Yeah. We are now working on um updating all of the property cards. How many they get in? It's about It's hard to tell because you not the full 500 or close to that. Right. We're We're lucky to get
into less than 10%. Really? Huh? People are not home during the daytime. That's true. And um people people are pretty good. Um a lot of times they just hesitate even though we sent the letter out. Yeah, I hesitate. I don't want a
strange man walking in my house. So, our data collector's pretty good. If he senses that they do not want him in, he just sees uh goes through the property card with them to see. Okay, that's good. You know, so at least that's
firsthand information. And uh so Kerianne's been working very hard getting it all um entered into our KMA system. So again, it must all be Way to go, Carrie. Slow and steady. So they provide you
with the the report and then you have to actually do all the data entry into the system. Yeah. So they take the property record card out in the field and then they make it they mark it up. Yep. Okay. Yep. Kind of how when you and Marty went out and did your abatements
um with it's pretty good now because we've been using the same data collector for the last couple of years. So we know his his method, right? So when you just see a date on the back of the card, it's because that's all where all the
information is is on the back. And so we're not flipping the cards, but uh it's usually pretty good. And any questions that we may have, um we can reach out to him, but we try to collectively get a group of them and then reach out to him rather than
individually. So, and I did let the um police department know that we were done with the cyclical programs and but did let them know that building permits will be coming up and I will notify them again. And that's what we have for the
last day of April. All right. Great. Been a long month. All right. And then we're moving on to Thank you for that. Uh the overlay surplus scenario. So with our overlay surplus in here, let
me pass this on to you. Oh, this one. So each year at tax rate uh I'm sorry, tax recap time, we have to look at a five-year overview of
um what our overlay account is. and we have to make ensure that we have enough money to cover all of the exemptions such as what we just looked at and also um abatements and the swap program.
So, with that said, and I do have a copy for each of you, um I have to keep a summary, and you will see that um the few years that they've been decreasing the amount that they've been
um having the assessors have any control over. Um you can see that we're in the red quite frequently, but we used to raise and appropriate a lot more. um
anywhere between 300 and high 200s. So now that they're minimizing it, but I can tell you that we do have a balance in this account of 1,200,000 that's not including the outstanding
um tax bills. we have to include that in with the scenario. But I'm very comfortable that we have at least three to 400,000 of excess levy uh I'm sorry, excess um overlay surplus. And and where
do I see that the 3 to 400,000? Well, you would see it if you were to be looking at um this form, which is what is is part of our tax recap.
So, with that said, um I have been asked by the powers that be the town manager via through the town council that we vote a sum of money and that is on that page that I think you passed on. Yeah.
Yep. I see here 71,6757. So if the board um is in agreement to release uh that dollar amount, I would need it in the form of a vote. Okay. So we are I I'm not exactly sure I
understand what what we're doing. So I don't want to vote unless if you could explain it a little bit differently maybe. Sure. So So this overlay account that we have this running balance on every year, what what is that used for? that is used for all of the exemptions that we used to cover the exemptions.
It's kind of like that the state doesn't cover. We said, you know, so we're we're we're saying we have this money set aside for exemptions. It's kind of got to be based on what we expect, right, the exemptions to be with a little extra contingency just in case. Correct. And
abatements that we do. And how did it get so abatement? How did it get so like it looks like all these other years like you mentioned you know it's sometimes it's a 100,000 200,000 sometimes it's we're 67,000
under right but now we're at 1.2 2 million. So, uh, back in, I believe it was 2018, they changed the law of how we had to do overlay reserve. Uh, for as
long as I have been doing assessing, overlay reserve was only good for the given year that you were in. So if you had an extra hundred,000 in just say fiscal 19 and fiscal 20 came along and
now you have a shortfall, you couldn't use the money from fiscal 19. You had to raise the deficit on the next year's recap sheet, which many assessors found very frustrating because if you had
additional dollar amount in the uh individual fiscal year's overlay account, why couldn't you allocate that if you came to a shortfall? So they did change that law and I can't remember if it was I believe it was part of the
municipal modernization act that they made this change. So that's why we look like we have a large sum of money. So they changed the law back what did you say 2018 and then that change allowed that account basically to build in value
every year that it wasn't expended. you know, it had the ability to um take whatever each fiscal year had its own bucket that we couldn't use and now they put all of the excess. Oh, so they would look back and say, we can use the bucket
when we want all these years where you had excess and Okay. And what's the formula to get this exact number of 71,6757? So this we're only releasing an exact dollar amount that the town is looking
to use and that is due to the purchase of this building and the taxes for it and the closing costs. Um, so, so we have this account that has this excess money in it now because of a change in
in the law and we could either keep the money in that account for many years of, you know, continued abatements. Mhm. But it kind of gets refilled every year anyway, right? And you'll notice so so we're just saying we want to use some of that excess to help purchase this
building. Well, not to purchase. This is just for the taxation part of this building. The tax is owed on it. But if you look in the fifth column over the totals, you will see at the beginning uh back from 2004 on how high the dollar
amount was. And then if you look at more recent since fiscal 19, and that's around the time that the law started to change, um you can see that we have gone much lower. The only uh high number was
in fiscal 23. And whenever there's a reertification year, we never know if we're going to have an additional amount of um abatements due to values changing. So that was a you know blip y in the the
typical um so and I have cautioned the uh our municipal finance director that they can continue to keep this on a lower and having us run into the the red in a particular fiscal year but knowing
we have one large bucket we're not in the red but eventually we are going to have to start raising more. So you can kind of you can kind of set aside less every year because you know that even if you end up exceeding what you set aside,
you have this big reserve, right? Yeah. And that's why we've been going in the red because you may as well at that point. Y because there's no real sense in holding that big of a reserve, right? Probably anyway, right? And the other thing is is we may depending on what the
town council votes um with the exemptions that we presented before them that this number may go down more a lot quicker. Yep. Right. Starting fiscal 26. When are they going to vote on that? Uh they're supposed to be voting on that at
the same time that they're voting the town budget before July 1st. Yeah. I think it's like the first meeting in June that they're going to vote and they said that they're going to do it at the same time. When they get up to that line in the budget, then they're going to
also have a um a vote to adopt in order to make sure that we have the funding available. Okay. So then my last question then would just be so if we vote yes to this, they could take the 71,000 out of this account to go towards the taxes that would be due for that
property. If we vote no, then they have to find that money somewhere else. Correct. And we are only releasing a sum of money. Then the municipal finance director has to validate that it is a surplus and then it can go before the
town council for them to take it from one account and transfer it to another account. And that'll be their next step. The only reason we would vote no would be is if we were worried that this account that we really need this money for to cover our exemptions.
Okay. And I don't have a problem with it. A lot of good questions. Thank you. No problem. I don't like to vote on something. I don't understand. Um All right. I make a a motion to certify
$71,675.7 which as an excess and overlay reserve account and transfer it to overlay surplus account. Do I get a second? I will second that motion. All those in favor? I I thank you.
We need to sign anything on that. No, it's going to be part of the minutes of our of our meeting. And that's the last thing before we go into executive session. We might want to just mention that we're going to hold
our next regularly scheduled meeting on May May 2. May 21. Okay. Uh great. I make a motion to go into executive session to discuss motor vehicle excise and boat
abatements, uh, exemption applications, abatement applications, and a personal property update, and an ATB update. We'll return to record our votes if necessary. Take a roll call vote. Hayden Smith, I. Marty
Grudgen, yes.