On a bluebird February morning with fresh snow coating the hills of Washington County, a dozen people made their way into the Roxbury Town Office in a long-closed railway depot on the town’s quiet main street.
Historic photos and a community quilt hung on clapboard walls; a bench once meant for waiting passengers was stacked with papers and office supplies. At the front of the main room, two men — Bill Hansen, Roxbury’s delinquent tax collector, and James Barlow, the town attorney — settled at a table to preside over the sale of two properties with unpaid tax bills.
First up was a 10-acre hilltop camp, still home to a man who had lived in the off-grid cabin for three decades and owed property taxes dating to 2022. Barlow opened bids at just over $6,700, the amount owed in back taxes. The price rose quickly as offers bounced among bidders in the audience, cresting at $20,000 — until a new prospective buyer, Tim Martin, a selectboard member and friend of the owner, jumped in and claimed the property for $21,500.
Martin had no intention of forcing his friend to leave; he’d seen the tax sale advertised and bought the camp largely to ensure the owner wouldn’t be evicted. Five years ago, the same camp had been rescued from impending tax sale when the resident’s brother paid its delinquent taxes. Martin anticipated the brother would buy back the property from him within the year.
Not all tax sales have such a thoughtful resolution. The other property up for sale that morning, a roughly two-acre parcel of land near the center of town owned by a Rutland man, sold to a Roxbury resident.
Regardless of who buys, just getting to a tax sale can be a long and costly process for municipalities. It had taken Hansen, the tax collector, more than three years to reach this auction day. During that time, the town had to absorb the tax shortfall, since Vermont requires municipalities to pay the full amount of school taxes to the state — regardless of how much they actually collect from taxpayers. The hit is twofold: Municipalities lose revenue that pays for town expenses such as road maintenance while also having to dig into their treasuries to pay the state its full share of school taxes. In recent years, the town was forced to account for roughly $100,000 in unpaid taxes.
Across Vermont, property taxes have been climbing faster than many residents’ incomes for years. For some property owners, especially those at the bottom and middle of the income ladder, keeping up with the bills has become harder. Tax collectors in several municipalities told Seven Days that delinquent accounts are becoming more common. That appears particularly true in rural communities, where property is often handed down for generations.
The consequences land heavily on Vermont’s smallest towns. Nearly three-quarters of Vermont’s 247 municipalities have only a few hundred property owners, meaning just a handful of unpaid tax bills can destabilize local budgets and force hard choices about staffing, services and long-planned projects.
Across Vermont, property taxes have been climbing faster than many residents’ incomes for years.
Over the years, lawmakers have tried to protect low- and middle-income families from getting priced out of their homes by property taxes. But rising education costs have outpaced those protections. The strain has altered the political landscape in Montpelier: After property taxes rose on average 14 percent in 2024, angry voters sent a number of state legislators packing in the fall election. Democrats lost their veto-proof supermajority, and candidates who campaigned on reining in education taxes captured seats.
That shift set the stage for a sweeping overhaul of Vermont’s education system that Gov. Phil Scott set in motion last year. The legislature’s proposed reforms not only target school costs but also would revamp and expand property tax exemptions for some low- and middle-income households and raise additional revenue from second-home owners — a politically delicate recalibration in a state where vacation homes dot the landscape.
Legislative leaders have promised change but not immediate relief. Most of the structural reforms under consideration would not take effect until the end of the decade, and only if they survive Statehouse wrangling and possible legal challenges. In the meantime, lawmakers are weighing stopgap measures: capping school spending, raising new revenue from high earners and approving another one-time buydown of education property taxes using General Fund dollars to blunt a projected 10 percent average property tax hike this year.
What happens in the final weeks of the legislative session could well determine who ultimately pays what for Vermont’s education system — and whether the state can remedy a property tax structure that many residents say no longer reflects their ability to pay.
In the Red
Cambridge Selectboard chair Cody Marsh and his colleagues have been confronting an unfamiliar problem: the longest delinquent tax list in at least 20 years. The growing backlog of overdue tax payments has tipped the small Lamoille County town into its largest budget shortfall since 2019.
After property taxes came due at the end of November, more than $500,000 remained unpaid. Despite recouping some long-overdue payments through recent tax sales, the town could not close the gap. After several months of collection, it was still out more than $150,000 as of late March.
“Had we not had a significant amount of delinquent taxes, there would have been no shortfall,” Marsh said in a recent interview.
Town officials were forced to cut back on contributions to Cambridge’s capital fund, delaying purchases of key infrastructure such as a fire truck or ambulance.
“It’s going to come around and bite us eventually,” Marsh said.
That pressure is being felt in other towns, often small, rural and lower-income communities with smaller property tax bases.
The strain is inextricably connected with the broader housing crisis. As affordable housing continues to lag behind demand, more income is absorbed by housing expenses, leaving less to pay rising tax bills. In a February poll by Hart Research that was commissioned by Let’s Build Homes, Vermont voters ranked taxes as their No. 2 concern after only housing. More than two-thirds of voters under 45 said housing costs have made it harder to afford basic needs.
Samantha Sheehan, a policy and advocacy specialist with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, said municipal budgets can get rocked when even a few property owners are unable to pay their taxes. The longer a town extends grace to a delinquent taxpayer, the longer other property owners effectively cover that outstanding tax.
“Either the town has to spend less money than it planned for public services or the town has to come up with money, usually through debt or by dipping into reserves to pay the difference for the delinquency,” she said.
Missed payments quickly add up to have an outsize impact in small communities. In these instances, town officials often look first at the largest budget line items — such as road maintenance and bridge repairs — for things that can be trimmed.
If municipalities choose to recover the money, they typically have two paths for recourse, but both require time, legal process and administrative effort.
One path is to work directly with the property owner, setting up a payment plan, negotiating partial payments or otherwise structuring a schedule to recoup the owed taxes over time.
The other is to initiate tax sales, as Roxbury did recently. When a property owner falls behind on taxes, the municipality can auction the parcel to recover the debt. The process begins with a presale period that gives the owner time to pay or arrange a plan, followed by a public sale if the debt remains unpaid. Even after the sale, the owner still has a year to repay the taxes, plus 12 percent annual interest on the sale price, and reclaim the property before a deed is transferred.
Tax sales can attract real estate companies and individual investors looking to purchase land at a substantial discount. Some buyers look to make short-term profits by capitalizing on properties set to sell below market value.
For some buyers, such as Alan Bjerke, a Burlington-based attorney, tax sales can also be about earning a reliable return. Bjerke regularly scans legal notices for upcoming tax sales. Part of his calculus is identifying properties that are much more valuable than the taxes owed; chances are an owner will pay off the debt — plus the 12 percent interest, which a buyer such as Bjerke pockets — rather than lose the property. In those circumstances, “the ultimate goal is not to get the deed,” he said.
Still, it doesn’t always work out that way. Bjerke is now landlord for several properties he purchased through tax sales. This past winter, he had to negotiate with squatters to vacate one of his more recent acquisitions.
In 2024, lawmakers revised Vermont’s tax-sale law to give delinquent taxpayers more time, extending both the presale and the post-sale redemption periods. Housing advocates praised the added protections. But municipal officials say the extended timeline forces towns to carry delinquent balances on their books for longer, deepening short-term budget strain as they wait for debts to be repaid.
Dan Monks, Bennington town manager, told his selectboard earlier this year that the revamped tax sale process “has become exponentially more onerous,” requiring officials to begin earlier and devote more resources to complete a sale. The town recently postponed a planned spring tax sale until this summer.
Some towns have had to take out short-term loans to cover debts, which come with their own steep interest rates. Those types of stopgap measures can ultimately make it that much harder for towns to recover, Sheehan said.
“If you understand the delinquent taxes as deferred revenue for any town, it’s a problem that builds quickly and then is resolved slowly,” she said.
All municipalities track delinquent taxes using the same methodology. Some still publish lists of delinquent taxpayers in their annual reports. But the state does not collect data on property tax delinquencies or tax sales, leaving residents, town officials and lawmakers without a comprehensive accounting of how deep the problem might run in Vermont.
Sheehan testified before the Senate Finance Committee in mid-February to share the concerns of some municipalities and call on the lawmakers to create a centralized report of delinquent education property taxes to be overseen by the state.
Sheehan explained how in Barre City, for example, delinquent taxes totaled about $500,000 of a $50 million budget, roughly 1 percent. In Granville, by contrast, more than $100,000 in taxes were overdue — nearly 25 percent of the town’s $470,000 municipal budget for the upcoming fiscal year.
Committee member Sen. Ruth Hardy (D-Addison) questioned whether there was any way to know if anecdotes and data points Sheehan shared were the exception, rather than the rule.
“Unless we have aggregate data, it’s basically speculative and anecdotal rather than actual data to make policy off of,” Hardy said.
Committee chair Sen. Ann Cummings (D-Washington) agreed that comprehensive data is necessary to inform any policy decisions.
The committee floated several ideas as to who would be tasked with pulling together data: Vermont League of Cities and Towns, the Department of Taxes or the State Auditor’s Office.
The meeting ended without a decision.
Pursuing the Debts
In Franklin County, Montgomery officials warned in the 2024 town report that the town was owed more than $200,000 in delinquent property taxes — its largest amount since “the depth of the pandemic.”
“Perhaps the most significant challenge we’re facing coming into FY26 is the amount of Delinquent Property Taxes the Town is carrying forward,” the town report states, noting that the deficit added “significant upward pressure on the tax rate.”
Katherine Barnard, Montgomery’s delinquent tax collector, wrote in this year’s report that she expects the total due to fall closer to $65,000, more in line with historical norms.
The stress on budgets pressures local officials to seek to collect delinquent taxes aggressively. But philosophies and approaches vary from town to town.
Some municipalities rely on the town clerk or other local officials to serve as delinquent tax collectors. In other localities, it’s a stand-alone elected position. Some towns pay delinquent tax collectors a stipend; others give them a percentage of what they collect.
In Bennington, town manager Monks favors vigorously pursuing the lost revenue.
“I may be considered a little bit aggressive, but I feel like we should go to tax sale every year,” Monks told the town’s selectboard in February, the Bennington Banner reported. “I don’t think we are doing people favors by letting them get deeper and deeper into holes. I think we need to address them as they come up.”
In Waterford, in Caledonia County, assistant town clerk and delinquent tax collector Marcel Lapierre takes a different tack.
“I’m not really in favor of tax sales,” Lapierre said in a recent interview. “I would rather try to work with a taxpayer and reach an agreement, even if I’m getting $200 or $300 a month or whatever. I’m at least getting something.”
“I take the approach that I’m going to work with you,” Lapierre said. “I’m not out to sell your house, take your house.”
Still, the budget pressures are mounting in Waterford. This year, the list of people on the delinquent taxpayer list was longer than ever, according to Lapierre. Property owners have told him that rising property taxes, heating costs, job changes and general economic insecurity make staying current difficult. During last summer’s drought, some residents had to choose between drilling a new well for drinking water or setting aside money for their property tax payment, he said.
Despite Lapierre’s best efforts to work with his neighbors, he’s preparing to bring one couple to tax sale because they have stopped working with him to address their outstanding property tax balance.
Tax sales, however, rarely result in evictions. That’s according to research and legislative testimony by Bjerke, the Burlington tax sale investor. When reviewing property tax sale data that he collected from 2022, he found that most auctions involve vacant land or unoccupied houses, often tied to deaths, inheritances or abandonment rather than families losing primary residences.
That was the case in Hancock, a rural community of roughly 350 people — including Sheehan, of VLCT — in Addison County. Delinquent taxes there swelled to more than $80,000 in recent years, a significant sum for a town of its size, Sheehan said. After several properties were taken to tax sale this year and officials stepped up collection efforts, the total has fallen to below $10,000.
The picture is more precarious just up the road in Granville, as Sheehan warned the senators. Last year’s delinquent tax list was the worst in decades, according to Cheryl Sargeant, the town clerk. At the end of June 2025, 13 taxpayers owed roughly $105,000. Fifteen properties are in the yearslong tax sale pipeline.
The profile of who falls behind has shifted since the end of the pandemic, Sargeant said. What used to be a problem primarily for lower-income residents now affects some households earning up to $100,000 a year. Out-of-town owners have also fallen behind; more than three-quarters of Granville’s roughly 300 taxable parcels of land belong to people from out of state, she said.
Granville has managed to carry its delinquent tax balance in recent years without taking out a loan, but Sargeant said it may have to use what’s known as a tax anticipation note, similar to a short-term loan, to fund the town’s current operating expenses. The town has had a note prepared, but it has never had to use it for property taxes.
“In the last two years, we’ve just barely squeaked by,” Sergeant said, “but this year we might have to do it.”
People have settled in Granville, tucked between two ski mountains, for its school choice and environmental beauty, Sargeant said. “But part of that enjoyment is suffering through things like high property taxes.”
Taxing Times
For nearly three decades, Vermont has funded its public schools through a system designed to blunt the sharpest edges of property taxation. It was developed after court rulings in the late 1990s found deep education inequities between property-rich and property-poor towns. In response, lawmakers created a statewide education property tax based not only on a home’s value but also a household’s income — that is, on the owners’ ability to pay.
Over time, those state taxpayer protections have become less effective. Home values and household earnings have risen, but the income levels to qualify for tax relief have remained static, so fewer middle-income homeowners are eligible for tax reductions. That leaves a growing share of Vermonters exposed to the full force of escalating school taxes.
“Income sensitivity has gotten out of whack,” said Steph Yu, executive director of the Public Assets Institute, a progressive think tank.
Yu’s group and others last year sought to reset the income levels in Vermont tax law.
“We’re trying to restore what income sensitivity was intended to do,” Yu said, “which is to protect the low-income and middle-class people from being priced out of their homes because of their property tax bills.”
Lawmakers and the governor largely agreed with that laudable goal but sought to achieve it in a different way.
Act 73, the school reform bill adopted last year, required a revamp of the property tax system that both expands and simplifies the protections while also stabilizing homestead property taxes, said Rep. Emilie Kornheiser (D-Brattleboro), chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Under the new system, households with income of less than $115,000 would receive protection from paying full property taxes. Those earning very little would get the most relief. (See chart, page 26.)
We need to work for the next three years for folks to make sure they can pay their bills and our schools can still thrive.
rep. emilie kornheiser
The income levels will be adjusted as the cost of living increases so that the new protections won’t erode over time, Kornheiser said. Lawmakers will tackle how to accomplish that in future years. The changes are planned to be phased in over four years, between 2029 and 2032.
“We need to work for the next three years for folks to make sure they can pay their bills and our schools can still thrive,” she said.
The tax department has estimated that under the new system, people making under $115,000 would collectively pay $45 million less in property taxes.
To allow for these more generous property tax exemptions, Act 73 envisions raising taxes on second homes. Precisely who would pay more — and how much more — has yet to be sorted out.
Lawmakers have struggled to find consensus on just how much property tax relief is needed, who should receive it and how it should be structured.
During a meeting of the Senate Finance Committee in late January, Sen. Martine Gulick (D-Chittenden-Central) asked colleagues to dig deeper into the common refrain that property taxes are too high, noting that many Vermonters benefit from provisions intended to link those taxes to their ability to pay.
“I have very high property taxes,” Gulick said. “I don’t like to pay property taxes, but I can afford them.”
Cummings, the committee chair, later circled back to Gulick’s comment, pointing out that she herself and her husband, a retired roofing salesman, are feeling the pressure.
“I can’t keep affording property taxes, and there is no place for me to downsize to except maybe a senior apartment, which I’m not ready to do yet,” Cummings said. The state faces the challenges of an aging population and declining students, she continued, “and we’re being asked to find a solution.”
In an interview with Seven Days in March, Gulick said she brought up her own tax bill after the committee repeatedly asserted that property taxes are too high without having a data-driven discussion. By sharing her experience, she hoped it would prompt more nuanced questions about how these taxes impact Vermonters differently.
“I want to make sure, when we are designing policy in our committees, that we are grounding the decisions that we’re making in evidence and in data and fact,” Gulick said. “Just observing behaviors in our lives sometimes can be misleading.”
This year, there were quite a few new people we’ve never had to chase before. People are stretched out pretty far right now.
delinquent tax collector marcel Lapierre
The current tax system is what pushed Waterford to its longest list of delinquent taxpayers in recent memory, according to the town’s assistant clerk, Lapierre. In the town of slightly more than 1,200 people, many residents are older, living on fixed income and on property that may have been in their family for generations, Lapierre noted.
“This year, there were quite a few new people we’ve never had to chase before,” he said. “People are stretched out pretty far right now.”
He has raised the prospect of policy reform with Waterford’s state legislators but feels they are overruled by lawmakers from more populous areas such as Chittenden County, where larger and wealthier municipalities are focused on different challenges.
“We’ve got to come up with something that’s a little different, but I don’t think Montpelier is interested in hearing that,” he said.
Looking for Relief
Act 73 is not the only way lawmakers are trying to tackle the problem of soaring property taxes. There’s a big push under way to reduce health care costs, which theoretically would reduce the cost of health insurance for educators, one of the key drivers of education spending.
But since Act 73’s tax reforms won’t kick in for three years, lawmakers and Gov. Scott again face the prospect of spending big bucks to keep property tax increases as modest as possible.
One idea is to shift money from the state General Fund to the Education Fund to “buy down” the property tax increases. That’s what lawmakers did last year, using $118 million to reduce the average property tax increase from an estimated 7 percent to around 1 percent.
Using one-time transfers in this manner, however, just pushes the need to pay a tax increase to the following year, fiscal analyst Julia Richter told lawmakers.
To avoid this, lawmakers are considering spending $127 million to buy down property tax rates, but over two years instead of one. This would limit the tax relief it would provide next year but smooth out future anticipated increases. Scott opposes this idea, saying taxpayers need relief now.
Cummings seemed comfortable with the proposal earlier in the session, noting that the state has often done what it can to smooth out financial hits to school districts or municipalities.
“This would be with tradition,” Cummings said.
Progressives are also pushing to “tax the rich” as a way to save the day. There are a few iterations. One bill, H.794, would impose an additional 2 percent tax on earnings over $250,000, and an additional 6 percent on incomes over $500,000. The bill would also impose a 4 percent “wealth tax” on estates and trusts of high-income people. All told, the new taxes would raise about $400 million a year.
Sponsor Rep. Kate Logan (P/D-Burlington) said her bill aims to recoup just part of hundreds of millions that high-income earners saved through recent federal tax cuts.
“The question is simple. Should the top 5 percent contribute a little more so that the other 95 percent can afford to live, work and prosper here?” she said.
That bill didn’t move forward, but the concept is not dead.
In late March, two Democratic lawmakers tried a last-minute maneuver to boost taxes on the rich. They proposed tweaking an existing bill to increase income taxes by 3 percent for households making over $500,000 a year and by 2 more percent on income over $1 million. Democratic leaders, fearing a veto from the governor, pushed back. The proposal is back in committee.
Other tax relief bills never saw the light of day. Rep. Gina Galfetti (R-Barre) proposed a bill to freeze property taxes for three years.
“It’s the only bill in the House that addresses property taxes this year,” Galfetti told the Ways and Means Committee earlier this session.
She acknowledged hers was a “simple bill” but suggested the committee, with a little “due diligence and research,” could “come up with something that can deliver tax relief this year for Vermonters like we were sent here to do.”
Committee members pointedly noted, however, that past reports have shown that freezing property tax rates without addressing underlying spending can actually end up exacerbating inequities in the tax system.
“We’ve been doing really everything we can to keep property tax bills as low as possible for Vermonters,” Kornheiser told Galfetti. “There is no simple solution. If there was a simple solution, we would have passed it already.”
Be It Ever So Humble
Back in Roxbury, Bill Hansen, the town’s delinquent tax collector, felt a sense of relief as the sale concluded and people headed off. He told Seven Days that he had stepped into the role because he wanted to get to know his community members better.
He was glad that the winning bidder seemed to understand the stakes for the man who lived in the remote cabin.
The town had collected the owed taxes, and the sale was officially concluded. The outcome seemed ideal: Roxbury got its money, and the home remained in friendly hands.
Hansen said it took multiple attempts before he was able to reach the property owner in the days leading up to the sale, which is a legal requirement.
Seven Days headed from the town offices to the camp in question, following a narrow dirt road that climbed toward the ridgeline. A weathered sign warned drivers to use four-wheel drive at all times.
From afar, there was little sign of life at the home tucked into the woods. The cabin with sagging siding had neither a mailbox nor driveway. But a thin ribbon of smoke rose from its chimney, and the footpath to the cabin’s front door had been neatly shoveled.
Inside, a dog barked.
As a reporter approached, a man stepped outside into the sunshine and pulled the door closed behind him. Seven Days is not identifying the resident out of respect for his privacy. He said he knew that his property had been set to go up for sale that day but didn’t want to talk about it, nor how he’d fallen years behind on his property taxes to end up in this situation.
He had lived there for 30 years. Whatever had been decided about the land, about his home, he was resolute. He planned to stay.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tax Burdened | Education reform won’t address property tax rates for years. As delinquencies rise in pockets of Vermont, leaders seek both short- and long-term solutions.”
This article appears in April 8 • 2026.
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