Cavendish Board approves new tax rates

By Lorien Strange
©2025 Telegraph Publishing LLC

Homestead property tax rates in Cavendish have increased by about 9% this year, according to data released at a Select Board meeting last Wednesday afternoon. The board held a special meeting to sign off on the new rates.

The homestead rates increased by 25.66 and 23.53 cents per $100 of appraised property value for Fire Districts 1 and 2, respectively. The non-homestead rates — for second home owners, businesses and residents who have not filed as a homestead yet — saw more moderate increases of 6.63 and 4.5 cents, but according to Town Clerk and Treasurer Diane McNamara, this follows a bigger jump that those rates saw last year.

Of course, the actual amount each property will see its taxes change also depends on any improvements to the property in the last year, tax exemptions, specific tax policies and state and local programs, but here are the rates approved by the Select Board for the tax period from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2026:

• Homestead, Fire District 1: $2.9811
• Non-Homestead, Fire District 1: $2.9858
• Homestead, Fire District 2: $2.865
• Non-Homestead, Fire District 2: $2.8698

These rates, given in dollars per $100 of appraised property value, include the municipal tax rate, the education tax rate and the individual fire district rate. The fire district rates are calculated  based on the budget, state land use credits and the Grand List for each district, resulting in two distinct rates that are added to the municipal rate and the education rate at the end of the calculations process.

The municipal tax rate, as McNamara explained following the meeting, pays for the town’s budget and tax-exempt properties. It’s calculated by subtracting expected revenues and state credits and adding tax exemptions to the value of the town budget, then dividing by the Grand List for the entire town.

That rate actually decreased this year from 0.7839 to 0.7697, reflecting a $6,400 decrease in the budget to $2.45 million for fiscal 2026 according to a calculation sheet used by the town.

So what’s driving the quarter-per-hundred-dollar increase in the homestead rates?

The state education tax rate for Cavendish has increased by 14.9% for homestead properties and by 3.5% for non-homestead properties since last year. McNamara suspects this was driven by the large number of property sales during and after the pandemic that sold significantly above their assessed values.

Vermont adjusts its education property taxes for each town based on a measure of how close the sales price of properties is to their assessed values. This is called the Common Level of Appraisal, or CLA, and it’s aimed at making taxes fair across the entire state despite many towns having assessments done at different times while market values change.

Each town is assigned a percentage based on property sales in a three-year period, offset one year from the year with the most recent available data. So, for 2025, the state considered property sales from 2023, 2022 and 2021. The closer the CLA is to 100%, thecloser the assessed value is to the market value. If sales prices of properties are lower than their assessed values, the CLA is higher than 100% and if sales prices are more than their assessed values the CLA is less than 100%

When the state Department of Taxes calculates the education tax rate for each town it divides the school district rate by the CLA for that town. Thus if two towns in the same school district have different CLAs based on sales and how old their most recent assessment is, their tax rates will be different to reflect the actual value of their tax base.

Cavendish’s CLA was over 100% and already falling before 2020, but since 2021, Cavendish’s CLA has been less than 100% and dropping about 10 percentage points per year.

Several other area towns, including Andover, Chester, Ludlow and Mount Holly, have seen a similar trend in their CLAs in the years following 2020. Baltimore’s CLA dipped in 2021 and 2022, but it has since increased following a town-wide reappraisal in 2023.

This year, the CLA isn’t the final number the state uses as a multiplier to determine education property taxes. There’s a Statewide Adjustment factor that’s used to bring the number the state uses to calculate town education property tax rates closer to 100%.

Before adjustment, Cavendish’s CLA this year is 62.10%—the second lowest in the Two Rivers Supervisory Union, with Andover a close second at 62.81%. With this year’s Statewide Adjustment set to 72.36%, Cavendish’s education tax rate was calculated as though the CLA was 85.82%.