Trego's Mountain Ear

The easiest way to answer “how would merging the districts impact local taxes?” is to compare the overall levy rates between the two districts, and their impact on school taxes, depending on property value. We’ll neglect tuition, since it’s not clear what those values are going to be, or if the law will change.

This means that switching from Trego to Fortine would be an increase of 24.86. This has a sizeable impact on taxation.

House Value	$100,000	$300,000	$600,000
Tax Increase	$33.56	$100.68	$201.37

This is a “worst case” scenario, to some extent. It assumes that adding Trego’s taxable value to Fortine’s wouldn’t make it possible to lower the levies somewhat (if not to Trego’s level). It likely would do so, though the decision to lower them would have to be made at a school board level, not by the taxpayers more broadly.

At any rate, the difference in taxable values between the districts mean that while a mill is calculated similarly for tax impact, it’s not calculated similarly for income to the school (this is where the difference in taxable valuation of the district comes in). So the next relevant question is: What would a merger do for the income to the school district? More on that in a later week.