Board of Aldermen 09-12-2018 Page 2
We are going to get in a lot more detail about this tomorrow, but suffice it to say that there is no agreement
or deal or anything with the developer or the EPA; to approve any kind of proposal like this would require
multiple Aldermanic votes on various issues, bonding, re-zoning, the creation of a TIF. All of this would
require public input, some of these official public hearings, Aldermanic votes, Planning Board would
probably go there a couple different times. My point being that there isn’t and there couldn’t be any
agreement, what we are trying to do is just find out what people think we should do at this point. Should we
do the capping thing or should we try to hold out for some maybe a longer term or more different solution.
So | am looking forward to meeting with the neighborhood and getting their input, getting their thoughts now
that they have met with the EPA and met with at least one developer, proposed developer, and find out what
they think about how we should go forward and really — the neighborhood could reach a consensus, | think
that’s the direction we should actually proceed
Next Mr. President now you sometimes accuse me of filibustering so | don’t want to go on too long here, but
I’ve got another topic that | wanted to touch on, which is the assessments. Now the notices have gone out
to all the properties. At the end of the week, the assessment notices will go out to all the commercial,
meaning the shopping malls, the multi-family apartment complexes, the industrial properties, all those
notices are going to go out at the end of the week. The total value of the City is likely to climb by over $2
billion dollars from about $8.3 billion current assessments to $10.5 billion or thereabouts.
Now as we have discussed before, this is not something that we undertook because we wanted to. We
undertook this because there is a State Law and even a provision of the State Constitution which requires
that every community re-evaluate, reassess every 5 years. That means take everything to 100% of fair
market value. This has been done in Hollis recently, Merrimack, and other communities all around New
Hampshire. We hired KRT because at the beginning, and this all gets a little bit technical, but the
equalization ratio for commercial properties was in the mid-90’s, meaning that the approved sales, the
qualified sales that had been analyzed suggested that commercial properties were on average assessed at
90% of fair market value whereas the residential properties were more like 80%. Had those numbers held,
we would have resulted in a large and significant shift of the burden from commercial on to residential,
because the commercial values would have gone up a little bit while residential values went up a lot. So the
portion of the whole represented by the residential values would have climbed.
But, | think we made the right decision, you approved it, to hire KRT, experts in developing the income
approach and other ways of evaluating commercial property. They looked at some of the sales that had
been previously been disqualified and in the end, commercial values have gone up nearly as much as
residential. But what has happened is that within the residential sector, there has been a lot of dispersion as
to what has happened in terms of the value of properties. We have properties that went up not at all, or the
assessment on which went down a little bit. On the other hand there are properties where the assessment
went up 25%, 30%, 40% or 50%.
Now obviously this is unfortunate for the people whose values are going up so much. But this is what the
market, beyond Nashua and in the City reflects, that homes that sold for $200,000.00 five years ago might
be selling for $280,000.00 today. Because the total value of the property is going to go up, the tax rate is
going to go down, no question about it. We are projecting, it is now at $25.79, it will go below $22.00 and be
somewhere between $22.00 and $21.00, probably closer to $21.00 than to $22.00. So the tax rate is going
to go down probably more than $4.00. As aresult the idea that if your assessment goes up 20%, your
taxes are going to up 20%, that clearly is not going to hold. But kind of in the middle of the spectrum, where
an assessment might go up 22% or 23%, you might see the taxes go up a little bit, several per cent.
For people whose assessments went up 10% or 15%, their taxes are going to actually fall. For someone
who stayed the same or went down, those taxes will go down significantly. For someone whose
assessment went up 40% or 50%, unfortunately their taxes will go up quite a bit and that is an unfortunate
part of this. One reason that we sought a delay, just because we didn’t want to see anyone pay higher
taxes, but this is what the market suggests and State Law really demands.
What we need to ensure is that anyone who has a problem regarding their assessment and believes that it
is too high or too low, | probably won’t see too many of those complaints, but believes that their assessment
