The Town Council should back off on their plans to raise property taxes. The Council doesn’t seem to understand that Jackson is expensive enough to live in without the Town making it worse. Even as voters just went to the polls and yet again rejected an increase in the sales tax the Town remains completely tone deaf to the message voters are sending: Learn to live within your means just like the rest of us do. Tighten your belt and cut your budget.
Property taxes are even more onerous than income or sales taxes, because they have no relationship to what the payer earns or spends. Rising property taxes put the squeeze on working class homeowners and oldtimers living on fixed incomes, forcing more and more normal people to sell their property and leave the community, taking our longtime, bedrock middle-class with them. A rising property tax burden will also affect landlords who own marginally performing older rental homes, pushing them to sell their properties to rich newcomers for redevelopment, further depleting our critical free-market affordable housing stock. If anything the Town should be advocating for it’s homeowners at the state level to prevent continued large increases in property taxes, not piling on by adding more mills at the local level.
Get the message Council: Town residents just want to live their lives free from being weighed down by your tax increases. We will accept reduced government services in exchange for that freedom.