By Joseph Domelowicz Jr.
The Lynn City Council voted unanimously, 10-0 among members present, to adopt the lowest possible tax rate for Lynn residents, and shift the maximum tax burden onto commercial and industrial property owners.
However, despite that shift, the average residential property owner will still see an increase in their overall tax bill this year, because of rising property values in the residential market.
With that the expected impact on the average single-family home in Everett will be an increase of about $175 for the year. For the average condo owner in Lynn the increase will be about $159 per year and owners of two- or three-family homes can expect an average of $348 per year.
According to Director of Assessing Peter Caron, who earlier had explained the effect of the tax shift and property values to the Council, since the proportions of total value in the residential and CIP (commercial industrial property) classes to the overall value changed significantly for fiscal year 2016, the net result of the shift would also change from Fiscal Year 2015 to FY 2016.
For instance, the levy percentages by class in FY 2015 were 74.65 (residential) and 25.35 percent (CIP), meaning that overall 74.65 percent of the city’s revenue that were raised by property taxes came from residential properties and 25.35 came from CIP properties. In FY 2016, because the residential property values had changed so dramatically, the levy percentages will be 76.43 percent residential to 23.57 percent CIP.
This shift means “typical commercial tax bills should go down,” Caron said. Expanding on that comment, he noted that businesses were paying just under 20 percent of the total taxes in the city in 2009. That number ballooned to 28 percent in 2014 and, with the shift, will drop to 24 percent this year.
Overall, the new tax rate and new property values will result in a new tax levy for FY 2016 of $117,176,303, a roughly 4.61 percent increase over the previous year tax levy, including the allowable 2.5 percent increase in the levy and the projected FY 2016 new growth.