By GLYNIS HART
[email protected]
CLAREMONT – City officials settled on a tax rate of $15.27 per $1,000 of assessed value, and property owners can anticipate tax bills arriving in their mailboxes this week and next.
The city’s rate represents an increase of 44 cents from last year. Adding the county, state and local school taxes, the grand total comes to $42.08 per $1,000, giving the City of Claremont the dubious distinction of the highest property taxes in Sullivan County.
Compare Claremont’s $42.08 to Unity at $29.94; Acworth at $27.05, Charlestown at $37.54. Charlestown and Claremont both outstripped Cornish ($21.99), Croydon ($16.23), Grantham ($26.09), Newbury ($15.50) and Springfield ($22.65). Towns with lower tax rates generally have higher aggregated property values. Neighboring Sunapee enjoys a tax rate of $15.57, while Warner’s tax rate is $28.62.
New Hampshire has the third-highest property taxes of all the states, with an average rate of 2.19 percent of the average home value, after Illinois and New Jersey (2.32 and 2.40 percent, respectively).
Claremont launched a city-wide revaluation of properties in October. Should the total tax value of city properties increase, the rate at which individual homes are taxed has a chance of going down. The process will take a year to wrap up, involving five different stages: data collection, market analysis, valuation, field review, and informal hearings. Property owners will receive their new property valuation next July or August, and have opportunities to contest the new valuation, possibly via the citizen-staffed board of assessment review.
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