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Dear Reading Homeowners,
I wrote a letter a week ago, urging you to contact the Select Board to ask them to implement a fairer property tax system here in Reading. It would reduce the increase in homeowners’ property taxes while resulting in a bigger increase for commercial property owners. Some Select Board members, who happen to be small business owners, stated that this would be a hardship for struggling small businesses.
Well, I have good news for them. If Reading homeowners spend just a small portion of their property tax savings at Reading’s small businesses, the businesses, as well as the homeowners, will come out ahead.
This is a win-win! So, I urge you (again) to contact the Select Board (selectboard@ci.reading.ma.us or 781-942-6644) to urge them to implement a fairer property tax system for Reading that would reduce homeowners’ tax increases, giving them money to spend at local small businesses. Specifically, I urge you to ask them to increase the property tax shift from residential to commercial property from 1.1 to 1.2 for 2025.
The Board is scheduled to make this decision at its meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 29, so please contact them soon.
Here are the details.
An increase in Reading’s property tax shift from residential to commercial property from 1.1 to 1.2 for 2025 will save the typical homeowner $71. This would be a win for Reading’s homeowners and a fairer split between homeowners and commercial property owners given the 14-year history of larger tax increases on homeowners than commercial property owners. Our local small and medium-sized businesses are likely to come out ahead because Reading’s 6,600 homeowners are likely to spend some of their savings at local businesses. Our large commercial property owners will pay more to the Town but still far less than they would in most nearby communities.
This shift would cost our 68 small commercial property owners (i.e., commercial properties worth less than $500,000) up to $570 in increased property taxes. However, if each homeowner spends just $6 of their $71 in savings at these local businesses, the businesses will come out ahead. If medium size commercial property owners are considered as well (i.e., commercial properties worth up to $1 million), if each homeowner spends just $17 of their $71 in savings at these 116 small and medium-sized businesses, they will all come out ahead.
Moreover, if the Select Board doesn’t increase the tax shift to 1.2 and leaves it at 1.1, it will be handing at least $11,400 to each of the seven very large commercial property owners in town (i.e., commercial property worth over $10 million).
Note that if the Board sets Reading’s property tax shift to 1.2, it will be the second lowest shift of the six adjacent towns. Four of those towns have a property tax shift of 1.75 and one has a shift of 1.57. The last one, with no tax shift, nonetheless, has a higher tax rate for both residential and commercial property than Reading does.
John Lippitt
Mineral St.
