JAY – The Maine Revenue Service has approved an adjustment to the town’s state certified valuation, following Jay’s third consecutive severe loss in valuation in as many years.
Jay had applied for the reduction in 2017, arguing that the Verso Androscoggin mill’s permanent shuttering of the No. 3 machine and associated equipment rose to the level of a “sudden and severe” reduction in valuation. An immediate adjustment in the state certified valuation, the figure used to set education funding and revenue sharing, is allowable is the State Tax Assessor determines that the municipality’s valuation has decreased by at least 2 percent.
Mike Rogers, supervisor of municipal services for the Maine Revenue Service, indicated in a letter dated Nov. 27, 2017, that Jay had qualified for a reduction of $61.5 million in 2016 and 2017, as well as the town’s proposed state valuation in 2018. The adjusted, state certified valuation for those three years would be $548.9 million, $524.9 million and $548.4 million for 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively.
“… [T]he Town of Jay has experienced a third consecutive annual severe loss in valuation due to the idling and suspension of operation of paper making machine #3 along with associated boiler and digester systems,” Rogers wrote.
In 2017, the town qualified for a loss of state certified valuation of $111.8 million. That reduction resulted in an increase of $73,000 in revenue sharing funds from the state, or 24.9 percent. The town also saw a reduction of more than $900,000 in its local contribution to RSU 73.
Question: Why does the state valuation rise again in 2018?
Yeah those figures are not rite.
Maybe now the taxpayers in Livermore and Livermore Falls will pay a little more to educate their students as Jay sure pays the bulk of the bill.