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windywalls · 01-21-2011, 09:51 AM

Better understanding is gained by looking at the last 25 years. Beginning in the mid-eighties you saw the knocking down of hundreds of lakefront camps and replacing them with four season vacation homes that carried assessments 5 to 10 times higher. Over the next 20+ years (with a hiccup in the early ninties) municiple tax bases grew at a double-digit rate. In many cases, towns were adjusting their tax base by doing spot assessments around the new shorefront construction and this was more then enough to support massive increases in municipal and school budgets. Everyone was drinking the cool-aid, "housing prices will never fall again". In the town I live in, this phenominon went on for two decades and then in 2006 the town conducted the first town-wide reassessment in many years, the results of which locked in the disparity. Just remember, a huge percentage of the towns revenue comes from lakefront properties and a huge percentage of those people are seasonal and don't vote locally, what do you expect?

01-21-2011, 09:51 AM	#14
windywalls Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2011 Posts: 1 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Longer term perspective Better understanding is gained by looking at the last 25 years. Beginning in the mid-eighties you saw the knocking down of hundreds of lakefront camps and replacing them with four season vacation homes that carried assessments 5 to 10 times higher. Over the next 20+ years (with a hiccup in the early ninties) municiple tax bases grew at a double-digit rate. In many cases, towns were adjusting their tax base by doing spot assessments around the new shorefront construction and this was more then enough to support massive increases in municipal and school budgets. Everyone was drinking the cool-aid, "housing prices will never fall again". In the town I live in, this phenominon went on for two decades and then in 2006 the town conducted the first town-wide reassessment in many years, the results of which locked in the disparity. Just remember, a huge percentage of the towns revenue comes from lakefront properties and a huge percentage of those people are seasonal and don't vote locally, what do you expect?