» Articles from June 2006
James Sheldon to SpeakJuly 15 at Taconic Hills
James Sheldon of LittleTownViews.com will be speaking on how residential and commercial development affects property taxes in rural towns as well as on town budgets and property reassessments.
Sponsored by the Taghkanic Neighbors Association, the talk will take place on Saturday, July 15, at 11:00 a.m. at the Taconic Hills School cafeteria.
In his talk, entitled “A Taxing Development: The High Costs of Unmanaged Growth,” Mr. Sheldon will discuss his research into the impact on school taxes of rapid housing development, and he will outline some of the land use strategies devised to manage development pressures.
He will also touch on recent research into town and village budget spending and The Real Problem With Reassessments.
All are welcome. For more details, e-mail Scott Stackpole of Taghkanic Neighbors at scottstackpole@hotmail.com.
Town Highway Spending: Is Your Town Falling Behind?
As a follow-up to our last column on town budgets, we’ve added a table to our “Budget Scorecard Database” that ranks 27 Hudson Valley towns by the amount of money invested over the 2000-2004 period per mile of road in the town.
Our aim is to point out which towns have spent substantially less than average on their road systems and to prompt town officials and citizens to follow up on our statistics with more thorough examination. The table, Town Highway Capital Spending , also highlights those towns which have invested substantially more money than average over the five-year period, another topic for concerned citizens to pursue.
Please read the initial column, Budget Scorecard: Where Does Your Town Rank? , that puts the statistics and their intent into context.
And please send us your comments!
Budget Scorecard: Where Does Your Town Rank?
In an ongoing effort to shed light on what drives our property taxes, and what we can do to control them, this column has begun to take a closer look at the annual budgets of the towns, villages, counties and school districts in our Hudson Valley region.
Working with data compiled by the New York Office of the State Comptroller (OSC), we are aiming to measure the fiscal performance of local governments and school districts, compare them to their peers, and identify key factors they may want to address in order to provide public services in more financially productive ways. Read more