Understanding Bloomfield’s Fiscal Year 2026 Property Taxes and Budget

There is much misinformation that has been spread about Bloomfield’s FY 2026 Budget and the resulting property taxes. Here are the facts.

Due to state-mandated (once-every-five-years) property revaluation, property tax amounts for the year have two pieces:

1) the effect of revaluation, over which the Council has no control other than how quickly it is implemented, and

2) the changes in Bloomfield’s operating and capital costs, which are approved by the Council and were relatively low and in line with most recent years.

What is the effect of state-mandated revaluation?

If the valuation of ALL properties changed by the same amount, there would be no effect on property taxes; values would go up but the mill rate would go down, offsetting your property value increase, producing the same tax amount. 

However, this was not the case with Bloomfield’s (and many other towns) revaluation: residential property value increased much more than commercial property, shifting approximately $5 million of tax burden from commercial property owners to homeowners. Think about the effects of Covid on the residential and commercial real estate markets.

But what about this?

What about the question being circulated: “property values increased by 40%, why didn’t the mill rate go down an offsetting amount?” It did.  But there’s important information being left out. The “40%” quoted is the aggregate (commercial and residential) increase.  What matters for homeowners is that residential properties in total increased 51%, but commercial properties increased only 27%.  Yes, the aggregate weighted average is 40%, but tax burden has shifted from commercial to residential properties.

If revaluation had been implemented entirely in the FY 2026 Budget, homeowners with the average reval increase of 51% would have seen a 12.7% tax bill increase before any changes in the Town’s operating budget. Accordingly, the Council mitigated this effect by phasing the revaluation effect over four years. As a result, a homeowner with the average reval increase saw only a 3.1% tax bill increase due to reval alone. That’s good news; however, it also means that, over each of the next three years, the reval-only increase will be about the same – this is built into future budgets.

By phasing the revaluation, the reduction in the amount of taxes paid by commercial property is gradual – they pay a larger share for longer, saving residential property owners money.

The table below shows the tax effect of revaluation, with and without phasing, at various assessment increase levels:

What were the changes in the Town’s operating budget?

As for the portion the Council controls, they approved a 4% tax increase to balance Bloomfield’s FY 2026 Budget. This is slightly higher than some recent years but not an outlier. The outlier year was FY 2024 with a 6.52% increase. That increase was orchestrated by former BoE Chair Don Harris in consort with former Councilors Suzette DeBeatham-Brown and Rickford Kirton, candidates on Row B.

The voices critical of the Council-approved FY 2026 Budget imply that the Council was responsible for all the tax increase, when a large piece of it was from the revaluation effect. They know this and are intentionally misleading people. Do you want to elect folks to council who will intentionally mislead you?

They also imply that, if elected, they will “lower taxes.” How?  What cuts will they make to the Town expenses to make this happen? To offset the ‘built in’ revaluation effect (continuing over the next three years) and with state law prohibiting cuts to the schools, they will need to reduce the Town operating budget of $59.3 million by $3.5 million annually. Where is this coming from? If they fire a couple of highly-paid staff that may get the cost down to $3 million that has to be cut. Where?

‘Budget critics’ point to small savings here and there, e.g. reducing a contingency fund by $100 thousand, but these changes in a $59.3 million Town operating budget won’t do it. This is an example of Parkinson’s Law of Triviality: people give disproportionate weight to trivial issues; in the cases of budgets, it’s often relatively small numbers that they can comprehend, not where the real excess spending is.

Bloomfield’s long-term expense problems

Bloomfield has long-term expense issues. In our schools we pay thousands of dollars more per pupil than neighboring towns. Fortunately Interim Superintendent Bethany Silver eliminated much of the Central Office bloat occurring under the previous administration and new Superintendent Tracy Youngberg is working to bring our expenses (and test scores) in line with our neighbors – but it will take time.

Town operations also need to be re-engineered. To do this, we need to accurately benchmark ourselves with neighboring towns and restructure staffing and expense, especially rich employee benefits – this is where the real savings are. Again, this is a longer-term fix, not an immediate one, and something we likely would have made progress on with town manager and finance department stability. (Unfortunately certain former Council members drove multiple town managers away:  “An Expensive Pattern of Interference with Town Staff”.)

Where’s the State Legislature?

As a state we need to change how towns generate municipal revenue. Property taxes are regressive and real estate market valuations are volatile, as Bloomfield experienced with the recent revaluation. Towns are unable to tax property types differently (e.g. luxury apartments taxed higher than workforce housing) and are unable to charge for externalities, such as road assessments for the damage trucks do to our roads or pollution fees. Changing this structure is a legislative task. Perhaps the critics’ time would be better spent at the Capitol rather than misleading Bloomfield residents?