Everybody hates taxes, but a lot of that hatred is because the system is invisible. Some pile of money goes to Montpelier, and some other pile of money goes to Washington, and it's hard to say what happens to it after that.
In a town of less than a thousand, the taxation system is more visible. Middletown Springs doesn't levy a sales tax or an income tax, so everything we raise is based on a tax on buildings and land. If you refer to our property tax rates as percentages, the numbers sound small: our tax rate rounds out to about 3% of the listed value of property, about three million dollars total against a property valuation of about $92M. And we know exactly where that goes: the town report, delivered to every household last week, itemizes what we spend for road work and road salt, what we spend for early childhood education and for legal advice. The budget actually makes use of the two digits after the decimal point: everybody's trying to be as careful and as responsible as they can be. The difference between a tax rate of 2.74% and 3.26% sounds pretty trivial, until you multiply it times a $200,000 house (a little below Vermont's average) and see that it's the difference between property taxes of $5,480 and $6,520 a year, in a community where the median household income is about $45,000. Frugality matters.
Everything costs more than it used to, and our standards are higher than they once were. Over 16% of Vermont's school kids are deemed to require special education, as opposed to the tiny fraction when I was in grade school. And that's good—a lot of kids in my grade school never understood arithmetic, but we had no term then for a "quantitative disability," and never really tried to help them much aside from telling them they'd never be any good at math. Now we do, we have more tools at our disposal… and they cost money.
We expect that we can live on dirt roads, widely dispersed from one another, and yet travel easily to and from work and the general store and the post office no matter what season. Back in the day, Middletown Springs was formed exactly because of the general expectation that such travel was unreasonable in the snow and ice and mud. But now we have to, or want to, get any place at any time… and that costs money.
I was talking with a car salesman when Nora was having her car looked at, and we were talking about the things that are common on cars that never existed when we were young. Some are terrific, like anti-lock brakes and traction management and electronic fuel injection instead of mechanical carburetors that never, ever seemed to be adjusted properly. Some, although we did without them for a long time, are nice, like air conditioning and cruise control. And some of them are trivial: cupholders and better stereos and power windows and multi-adjustable heated seats. Every one of those things, from the computerized brakes to the CD player, costs money. And so even a pretty "basic" car costs more than it would have, because it has all of these little incremental charges built into it. Town services are the same way: we live differently than we used to, and so we pay more than we used to.
We do a lot of things through volunteerism as well. People invest a huge amount of time here doing things that support their community. We don't consider the tax rate on our time, but it's there. We have a volunteer fire company, and a volunteer planning commission, and selectboard members who make an annual stipend of about six hundred bucks a head, a far cry from the professional wages those roles might accrue elsewhere. Those volunteer hours are all unseen taxes that fall more heavily on some than on others, and it isn't always easy to find those who want to give such a high proportion of their time: nine of the 23 elected seats in Tuesday's town vote are going to go begging, left unfilled. Only one is contested. The other thirteen are filled by people who step forward over and over.
We have an informal baking tax. We made food for the Building Committee's informational meeting two weeks ago, and we're making food for the Building Committee's fundraiser on election day, and we're making a pie for the Library's Pie for Breakfast next Saturday; each food donation costs us about two hours and six or eight dollars for ingredients. And then we go to those events and spend another two or three hours and buy back the food, our own and others', for another six dollars. And then we go home and wash our pie plate or casserole pan.
Our town fields a lot of requests for town support of various not-for-profit endeavors. Some are small, like the ones that support youth sports in the next town over that our kids sometimes participate in. Some are large, like the request for the new roof and furnace for the firehouse. The town ballot itemizes each one, so that we all vote to separately approve or deny the request from hospice care or the women's crisis center, about twenty requests in all. For every thousand dollars we approve, our property taxes and those of our neighbors will rise a buck or two or five, depending on the worth of our house. The $50,000 for ongoing development of the new town office… about $57 per hundred thousand value, or about $125 for an average homeowner. The road budget, the school budget, considerably more.
There aren't any right answers to any of this, no matter how much the pundits harangue us. How much is the right amount? How many hours should we work at the book sale, how many dollars should we contribute to the volunteer fire company, how quickly after the snow storm should a Class 3 road be plowed? How many pies do we make, how many meetings do we attend, which community roles need us most? The angels on our right shoulders tell us we're needed, see that we could be helpful and that our neighbors depend on us; the devils on our left shoulders say, "Enough already! No more cookies!" And all of those individual calculations, the balancing between naming and judging and meeting needs and our own tolerance for yet another request for money or time or casserole, will come together in simple town-wide counts: how 400 votes will divide themselves, how much the Library raises through pies, how many people will stand up next year to make themselves candidates for public service.
Tomorrow night's town meeting ought to be interesting, the angels and devils in open discussion on the floor, and inside our own heads.
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