When Kayla Poissant received her property reassessment in the mail two weeks ago, she was surprised to find that the value of her downtown St. Albans residence had nearly doubled. The assessed worth of her historic 1890s house — the first she’s ever owned — went from $158,200 to $384,000, a rise of about 143 percent. “I was shocked,” she said.
Poissant, 34, who has two young children, immediately feared that her property taxes, too, would soar. A childcare professional whose husband is a web developer, she doesn’t have any wiggle room in her budget.
“If our taxes increase, it would put a huge strain on our finances,” she said. “We’re just trying to figure out how they came up with this number.”
Poissant isn’t alone. A Facebook group for St. Albans residents was littered with hundreds of comments from fretful neighbors. “I think I’ll be unable to keep living here,” posted one person, whose house value had more than doubled. Other residents attempted to explain that higher assessments don’t necessarily equal higher taxes, but no amount of reassurance stanched the stream of panicked posts.
City officials had been bracing for the backlash. St. Albans last went through a reassessment, the process of determining the value of private properties for tax purposes, in 2011. In Vermont, which relies heavily on property taxes to fund public schools and other functions, the amount of municipal taxes that owners pay is determined by their home’s value.
Experts recommend that municipalities reassess properties every four to six years. But it wasn’t until 2022 that St. Albans’ common level of appraisal — a tool to determine how far a municipality’s property values veer from fair market levels — became so out of whack that it triggered the state to order a citywide reassessment.
A preliminary analysis of St. Albans’ recent reassessment, which cost the city $300,000, reveals that the grand list — the roster of all taxable properties within a municipality — had increased in value by 88 percent. Some homes more than doubled in value, said Chip Sawyer, the city’s director of planning and development.
Sawyer has been trying to tamp down residents’ fears. The new figures don’t mean that the city’s budget has changed, he explains — with most homes going up in value, the tax burden will remain about the same for most residents.
That’s because a citywide reassessment is “revenue neutral.” After the revaluation process, the tax bills are determined based on apportioned property values. If the overall value of homes goes up by 40 percent during a reassessment, for example, an individual property whose value rises that amount will not see any change in a tax bill. “The thing is, though, no one is really going to believe it until they see it,” Sawyer said.
St. Albans is among scores of Vermont municipalities facing fast-rising property values and long-overdue reassessments. Burlington’s property reassessment set record-high values in 2022, prompting widespread panic. Stowe, too, made statewide news last year when its property values were found to have doubled after a reassessment that was long overdue. Smaller towns, such as Putney and Athens, also have produced stark reassessments in recent years.
For decades, Vermont has relied on municipalities to shoulder the burden of carrying out their own assessments and maintaining accurate property values. But in recent years, many have been unable to do so because of a shortage of qualified assessors and listers, professionals hired by municipalities to determine the fair market value of properties. The result is that for many communities, the values assigned to private properties are outdated and far out of line with the market, leading to shock and confusion when reassessments finally happen and, in the meantime, less tax equity.
“The longer you go between doing a town reappraisal, the more regressive the tax is, meaning that people who have a higher-value property are paying less of a proportion of their property value than those with a lower value,” said Jill Remick, director of property valuation for the state.
Now, though, state legislators are proposing that the reassessment process be overhauled. Instead of a town-by-town approach, they want reassessments to be undertaken on a regional basis. A dozen or so new assessment districts would be responsible for reassessing the towns within them every six years. The plan is contained in a bipartisan education reform bill that passed in the House earlier this month but is expected to face strong headwinds in the Senate.
Proponents say the proposal would streamline the reassessment system and create more equity when it comes to determining property values. Critics, though, worry it would curb local control and that transitioning to a regional timeline could be problematic for towns.
The discussion comes as state lawmakers are discussing changes to the funding formula for schools. No matter how assessments are accomplished, experts say that having up-to-date property values would spread the tax burden more fairly if those formula changes are made.
“We have some municipalities that are doing an excellent job and keeping up,” said Josh Hanford, director of intergovernmental relations for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. “We have others that are 16 years behind. It creates a lot of volatility.”
Across the country, states handle reassessments in varying ways. In California, for example, reassessments are only required when a property is sold, while in Montana a statewide reassessment happens every year. Almost all other states rely on county- or state-level government to schedule, manage and regulate assessments.
In Vermont, however, municipalities have been responsible for managing the process and receive a per-parcel payment from the state meant to cover about half the cost of the task.
Until 2023, municipalities were required to reassess their properties only when a municipality’s previously assessed values veered out of line with market values by more than 15 percent. Two years ago, though, state legislators passed Act 68, which requires Vermont towns to reappraise properties every six years, starting this year.
The six-year requirement marks one of the state’s attempts at clearing the assessments backlog, a pileup that has swelled rapidly since the pandemic, when Vermont property values increased dramatically.
Municipalities haven’t had much incentive to keep values up-to-date. Reassessments cost communities money, and informing people of higher property values creates anxiety. “It’s kind of like, which bad door do they want to open?” Hanford said.
Another reason so many communities have fallen behind is that it is so hard to find qualified people to do the work. Many assessors and listers have retired, leaving a shortage of workers in a profession that has become more complicated than ever. Still, some local listers are willing to stay on the job out of loyalty to the towns where they work.
“There are a lot of folks in the community who are in their eighties and nineties who are hesitant to retire because there’s nobody there to take their place,” Remick said. The Department of Taxes is increasing efforts to recruit and train listers.
The result is a handful of listers working for multiple towns through a hodgepodge of part-time contracts. That patchwork is not sustainable for the listers, nor cost-effective for the towns contracting them, officials say.
“We want scale in order to get good, quality contracts, for both cost-saving and efficiency reasons,” said Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (D-Brattleboro), chair of the House Committee on Ways and Means. “Plus, we need to be appraising at a quantity of properties that allows us to do a meaningful statistical evaluation of our reappraisal process.”
The proposal for regional districts is only a small piece of a larger education bill, H.454, the main focus of which is to devise a new property tax classification and shift the way schools are funded. But lawmakers behind the measure see it as a critical building block for more equitable education financing.
In the version of the bill passed by the House, the new “assessment districts” would not go into effect until 2030, and only after a working group made up of listers, lawmakers and tax experts has hammered out details of the transition.
The Vermont Assessors and Listers Association has voiced concerns about the proposed switch to a regional model, arguing that taking the assessment function from municipalities “undermines accountability, accuracy, and public trust.”
Others, like Tom Vickery, who served as Stowe’s assessor for decades, worry that the new plan would be difficult to administer and that mass reassessments could produce an overwhelming number of appeals from property owners.
But if the regional approach is to move forward, Vickery said, the legislature should map the proposed districts — so far only loosely sketched and still up for debate — onto existing supervisory union districts used for schools.
Hanford, of the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, echoed Vickery’s sentiment. “All of these things would work a lot better if we were all talking about the same regions and working from the same framework,” he said.
Sawyer, the St. Albans planning director who oversaw the city’s recent reassessment, said regular updates make sense and would produce more consistency in property values.
Poissant and her husband, whose St. Albans house value rose substantially, said they love living where they do but are contemplating a move out of state if their property taxes go up by more than they can afford. In the meantime, Poissant said, she is contesting her reassessment with the city.
“It’s a waiting game,” she said. “We’ll just have to see when our tax bill comes out.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Home Worth | Some Vermont lawmakers want to revamp how real estate is assessed as part of the education funding transformation”
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This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.
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