AUBURN – While some homeowners brace for dramatically higher taxes, commercial property owners may see smaller increases.
Blame the marketplace, Auburn Assessor Cheryl Dubois said Tuesday.
Since the last citywide appraisal was completed 15 years ago, the value of the average residential property in Auburn rose almost 50 percent, Dubois said.
Over the same period, commercial properties rose by about 20 percent.
As a result, a greater portion of the city’s budget will be paid from the revenue of residential properties, Dubois said.
She calls it a swing.
It’s something that’s been happening to homeowners throughout southern Maine for the past several years, she said.
“It just reached Auburn three or four years ago,” she said. Before that, home prices had been pretty flat.
“We’re just catching up,” Dubois said.
In this case, Auburn may not want to catch up to southern Maine, said Alan Caron, president of GrowSmart Maine.
“It has the effect of driving residents out of towns,” said Caron, whose Yarmouth-based group has been examining growth in municipalities for several years.
Meanwhile, it proves development leaders wrong in one of their arguments, justifying new hotels and big-box stores by saying they will help expand the tax base and thereby lower everyone’s tax bill, he said.
Their jobs and other attributes may be well worth the development, said Caron, but the tax base argument doesn’t figure.
Just look at his own town of Freeport, he said.
With L.L. Bean and the factory outlet stores, the town hit the development jackpot. Yet, homeowners pay at one of the highest rates in the state, he said
“We’ve been listening to this stuff for a couple of decades,” said Caron. “Tell me where it works.”
The only exceptions are small towns with large industries, such as Rumford and its paper mill or Wiscasset before the Maine Yankee power plant closed.
Dubois, who worked in Yarmouth for several years before returning to Auburn in 2004, watched home values skyrocket in that coastal town.
She, like Caron, said Auburn is merely following the trend of communities throughout the area.
“Commercial property values have not kept up with residential growth,” she said.
Caron believes such changes should not trigger hardships for homeowners. As more move away to smaller towns with lower tax bills, they will demand more services and drive up taxes there, too, he said.
“It’s making itself worse all the time,” Caron said.
His group is sponsoring a $500,000 study aimed at examining Maine’s property tax system. The Brookings Institution aims to complete the study by next fall.
“We’ve been tinkering with a broken system,” Caron said. “We need fundamental rethinking.”
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