Property Tax Study Talk

This week Carollynn Lear, Bangor City Manager joins Rebecca Lambert and Amanda Campbell to discuss the first meeting of the Legislature's newly established Real Estate Property Tax Relief Tax Force.  Of the task force’s 13 voting members, Carollynn was appointed by Governor Mills to represent the interests of larger communities.  Having served as the deputy commissioner for the New Hampshire Department of Revenue, she brings to the table an in-depth knowledge of the issues associated with the over-reliance on the property taxpayers to fund a variety of government programs and services.  To learn what Carollynn hopes to accomplish over the course of the study, please click here.  Listeners interested in receiving task force updates are encouraged to subscribe to MMA’s opt-in study summary email list by emailing Laura Ellis at lellis@memun.org or visiting the Maine State Legislature’s website here for the official task force interested parties email list.  

Transcript

Welcome everyone to Potholes & Politics, Local Maine Issues from A to Z. I am your co-host, Rebecca Lambert. And with me as always is my amazing colleague, Amanda Campbell. 

Good morning, Rebecca, and thanks everybody who's listening. 

Good morning, Amanda. So, on our last episode, we welcomed Peter Osborne, who is MMA's Director of Educational Services and also Shiloh LaFreniere. She is the town manager of Jay and also an MMA Executive Committee member. And they were on the episode to talk about our upcoming annual convention, which is being held on October 8th and 9th at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor. If you missed that conversation, go on back and give it a listen. And while you're at it, you can like and subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform that you've listened to it on. By doing that, you'll be notified when a new episode drops, ensuring you'll never miss one of these compelling and always entertaining episodes. 

That is true, Rebecca. Thanks. And this week I'm gonna summarize the first meeting of the Property Tax Relief Task Force, say that 10 times fast, that was held last Friday. And in addition, we're gonna welcome Carollynn Lear, City Manager of Bangor. Thanks, Carollynn for joining us. 

Thanks for having me. 

So first I'm gonna do a quick overview of the task force for our listeners. At the end of the first session, the taxation committee voted a bill, LD 1770, unanimously out of their committee directing a legislative study of the property tax system in Maine. The goal of which was to determine the source of the problems with the current system, who is most negatively impacted and how. And, both Leg(islative) Counsel and the Appropriations and Financial Affairs committees voted that resolve off of the study and appropriations tables.

The bill was finally enacted and then was signed by the governor. And since this was passed as an emergency legislation, action could take place immediately after it was signed. And as a result of that, the task force held their first meeting last Friday, September 12th. 

So, Amanda, how were the members of the task force chosen and who are they?

The task force has four legislators, several members of the public who represent different aspects of the property taxation cycle. There are realtors, economists, representatives from the business sector, representatives of low-income taxpayers, the elderly population, and we have three municipal officials who are also members of our LPC.

Several of those folks are appointed by the governor. And the others are appointed by the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate. And so today we're thrilled to talk with Carollynn Lear, who as I mentioned, is the city manager in Bangor, and she was appointed by Governor Mills to represent the interests of municipalities with a population of 10,000 or more.

The other two municipal officials are one who represents a population of under 10,000 residents. And the other is someone who is an assessor. So, all three of them are LPC members and we'll be welcoming them as guests on the podcast in future episodes. But for today, Carollynn, welcome. And can you introduce yourself a little bit to our listeners?

Yeah. So, Carollynn Lear, I'm the very new City Manager of the City of Bangor. I've been in that role for about two and a half months now, maybe almost three. And prior to being a city manager, I was with the Internal Revenue Service for about three years, working for the Taxpayer Advocate. And then prior to that I was the Deputy Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Revenue.

And I was with the Department of Revenue for about 10 years, and I mentioned to the committee, that New Hampshire had the dubious honor of being the most property taxes collected per capita on a list that was distributed to the committee. So, I'm certainly familiar with some of the challenges around high property tax burdens having come from New Hampshire.

So, Carollynn, one of the duties of the task force is to investigate how other states execute their property tax programs. Since you have property tax experience from New Hampshire, what can you tell us about Maine’s system and how it compares to where you're from? 

I think one of the biggest observations that I have made so far is just the rigidity with which the cyclical revaluation process is administered in New Hampshire. I think because, primarily because the property tax is, for many taxpayers, the only state level tax that they're paying and New Hampshire does have a statewide property tax in addition to the county and local tax that's administered, the state does play a pretty, rigid role in ensuring that regular and ongoing revaluations are taking place. And not necessarily just the full measure and list valuations, but also, statistical updates throughout. I think the other observation I would have is that having a really robust revaluation system is very, very expensive to municipalities. And so, I think that there's some important conversations to have there about the value of being a bit more rigid and how frequently property is revalued versus how much it costs to realistically do that and do that well. 

Is New Hampshire having as difficult the time finding those revaluation companies or assessors, in the same fashion that Maine is having, issues with… There's just nobody to do them right now. And so, I think municipalities are not only struggling to pay for the service, but, be, find someone to even do the service at this point. 

Yeah. What's really interesting to me is that the players, the contractors in this space are the same. It's the same companies servicing both Maine and New Hampshire. And this is just a working theory. I don't know that I have any evidence to this, but I wonder if, because, New Hampshire is so reliant on the property taxes to the exclusion of all other tax revenue, if municipalities in the state are willing to pay more, than perhaps a Maine municipality that is probably charging quite a bit less in property taxes because it's just a lower proportion of their overall revenue stream.

That's just a theory. But to answer your question, not to the level that I'm hearing here in Maine. I did not frequently hear that municipalities were having trouble finding people to do the work. 

Interesting. Well, and now hearing that, because as you mentioned, it's required so much more frequently than it is here, in New Hampshire, those companies who are servicing both states certainly have a vested interest in and job security in New Hampshire. Where, where here they don't necessarily, I mean, yes, they have to be done under certain parameters, but certainly not with, as you say, the rigidity that they're required in New Hampshire. So that's very, very interesting.

I suspect that most municipalities have a yearly contract with their vendor, and so it's regular and ongoing reliable income. And we talk about, we would talk about, oh, that's a KRT town, or that's a Vision town because just year after year, they're, they have a reliable vendor that they're investing money in every year to do statistical updates or pickups or full revals when it's necessary. 

Interesting. Very, very, very thanks for that. That's information that's very interesting that I didn't know about and I love tax policy, so that's very interesting. And so finally we're gonna keep this sort of brief, but can you give us a summary? What were your impressions of the first meeting and what are you hoping that might come out of it?

Yeah, I was pleasantly surprised in a couple of ways. I felt like the legislative appointees to the committee were very sympathetic and had a level of knowledge about some of the challenges that I didn't necessarily expect them to have, but they did wonderful. And I also thought it was pleasantly surprising that some of the maybe non-tax expert committee appointees were very engaged and willing to ask questions to clarify their understanding. I think that particularly property tax administration, primarily because of the really complex need to assess property and how complex and intricate assessment is, can be very confounding to folks.

And I think not having a sort of baseline common knowledge and understanding of how it all works can be a real barrier to trying to come up with solutions for improvement. So, I was pleasantly surprised that folks really had an interest in getting up to speed and understanding a pretty complex topic.

I would agree with that.  Specifically, there are some members who are economists, representatives from the business sector, representatives from the real estate sector who have an understanding of property taxation on their level and how it interacts in their job. But they, I agree there were some very meaningful and well-intended questions that were asked by folks who don't necessarily have a robust understanding of property taxation process. So, I thought that was great as well. And what would be one thing that you hope to come out of this study at the very end? 

Ooh, that's a big one. I think one of the things that I was sort of thinking in the back of my head, as some of the conversations were happening, is there was a ton of conversation about, that's what the state does versus that's what a municipality does. You know, that's a state tax, that's a municipal tax, that's a municipal obligation to fund. That's a state obligation to fund, but I think in the grand scheme of things, when you think about your average taxpayer, they don't distinguish between the two. 

Right.

And certainly, the impact of funding decisions and taxing decisions have the same impact on a taxpayer, whether or not it's coming from the state or the local government. A dollar raised via taxes is a dollar raised. And so, I think it behooves us as committee members to not try to think of the problem in the context of an us versus them, I mean municipal versus state issue, but rather to think about it from the perspective of the taxpayer and understand that regardless of who's imposing the tax and at what level, it has an impact on real people. Regardless of whether it comes from the state or the local government, it's still a dollar raised via taxes. And so, I think particularly because I think this conversation is happening because we're hearing that people in our communities are having a hard time making ends meet, that we cannot limit ourselves in how we discuss the problem and how we discuss potential solutions.

That was a really long answer. 

That was great. 

Thank you so much, Carollynn. This has been great discussion and it's really important to get your insights as one of the commission members. So, thank you so much for being with us today. 

Oh, you're welcome. 

Yeah, this has been great. Absolutely. For our listeners, we will be dropping some links into our show notes so you can review the task force meeting documents. If they're not available at that link, just keep checking. I'm not sure when the legislative staff will be downloading or uploading all of that information to the website but be sure to check it out. And if you haven't signed up for our opt-in study summary email list, you still can, by emailing Laura Ellis, from our department and we will drop her email address in the notes as well. 

So again, Carollynn, thanks so much. This has been great conversation, and we look forward to inviting our other members of the task force as well. And I look forward to seeing you at the next meeting. They have not finalized that date yet, but we will have that published as soon as we know it for our listeners.

And, yeah, great, great tax discussion. I love taxes.

Thanks so much for agreeing to be on the task force. We really appreciate the support. 

I love taxes too, so it's really a fun thing for me, but please don't tell people. 

That's great. 

Yeah, don't worry. 

Great. 

Well, there we are then.

Okay. 

There we are then.

Link to meeting materials for 9/12/2025:   https://legislature.maine.gov/real-estate-property-tax-relief-task-force-9122025-meeting 

Email lellis@memun.org to join our opt-in study summary email list for LD 1770.

Spectrum News Coverage of the meeting HERE