Taxation Pressures
What's really happening in our property tax bills
Some of you are new subscribers. I’d ask that you go through some old posts to get up to date. The content of this Substack will vary — it’s a one-person operation, I have a lot of irons in the fire, and some pieces take longer to refine than others. What follows is a piece that was in the works for awhile about tax pressures. Everything is written in the style of citizen op-ed journalism. Thanks for reading.
In a post a few weeks ago, I took offense when several members of the city council harshly criticized the RSU 71 budget during a meeting. My criticism was not without cause. RSU 71 faced some tough choices this year. Their budget increased 9%, and several elected city officials found this to be egregious and said so loudly in a public meeting. However, I felt that RSU 71 has demonstrated a track record of sound fiscal management, and I feel that the impact of the school budget on Belfast taxation gets misrepresented, continually. My aim was to end that debate, once and for all, with facts. You can read that post here:
Prior to that 9% increase in 2025-26 to a $32.9 million bottom line, their budget had only increased by 21% from $25.2 million in 2015-16 (the inaugural year for RSU 71) to $30.4 million in 2024-25. I actually made a mistake in an earlier post because I pulled 2015-16 data from a state Dept. of Education spreadsheet. It turns out that the spreadsheet stated the minimum required funding for the district, not its actual budget, so I unintentionally painted the RSU 71 budgets in a worse light than their actual financials show — I do make mistakes, and I do correct them when found.
This means that the RSU 71 budget will have only increased by 31% over the district’s first eleven years of existence — while CPI inflation has climbed by 35% during the past ten years1. RSU 71 has kept budgets under official rates of inflation for over a decade. While some of this is explained by declining enrollment and reductions in staffing, overall, it demonstrates that RSU 71 is not some kind of parasite sucking our tax money away. David Crabiel, former RSU 71 Board Chairperson, and Cory Seekins, a current RSU 71 Board member have both publicly made this point about the School Board’s fiscal responsibility. I went to all the budget meetings this year for the district. I believe them. The numbers prove it.
Laura Baker, a RSU 71 Board Member who represents Belfast, came to the Belfast city council Meeting on June 15, and spoke concerning her own personal views. She had some things to ask the city council, after having visited them about a month earlier with the RSU 71 Superintendent to discuss school budget matters. It was the meeting following that one, when no members of the school board were present, that the city officials cited came out publicly against the school budget.
It appeared that Laura was personally taken aback by the city council comments at that following meeting — the ones I wrote about, and she had this to say — delivered very politely, I will add:
When I was here at a council meeting, to speak about the budget, you said you wanted more communication. Communication is a two-way street. No councilor has ever called or written a question to me…I ask that you refrain from throwing the school district under the bus…we need to work together.
I am bringing this up again, because I hope that we can finally put the allegation to bed that the school district is the cause of tax increases in Belfast, and that it’s not just me accusing the city of poor communication. We need to move past the blame-the-school-district-game if we’re ever going to get serious about sound fiscal practices in Belfast. Many voters, me included, were willing to give the RSU 71 a one-year pass due to the issues that snowballed to make this a bad budget year.
Belfast finally passed a city budget that stays below inflation for 2025-26 — with only a 1.7% increase2 (we’ll talk about this in more detail in another post). I get it, how city officials are frustrated that the RSU’s issues snowballed into a large increase this year, and I get that it feels like they’re finally slowing things down and here comes something that taxpayers may try to blame the city for, because the city is the entity that sends out the property tax bills, and the city just can’t get a break. I’m trying to scream at the top of my lungs that the pressures on those tax bills in prior years though, have been coming from the city budget, not the school district.
So yes, I took strong offense at elected officials taking positions against the RSU budget in a public forum, and not on their own private time as citizens — in council meetings where they speak for the city and set the tone and direction of the community. Belfast’s city budget went from $8.9 million3 to $16.0 million from 2015-16 to 2025-26 — an 80% increase. I viewed it as the pot calling the kettle black. I open my tax bills every year with trepidation like a lot of working-class people do. Belfast nearly doubled the taxes on my house through the revaluation last year — a 98% increase, despite it being a modest house that was worth below the median home value in Belfast when we purchased it, and despite still being below the median home value in Belfast. I received an abatement, that I fought hard for, and that lowered my tax bill to just a 47% increase. I’m supposed to take that as a win. It doesn’t feel like one.
So, when I see my tax bills, I’m fully aware of the largest pressure on those bills. And I found it hypocritical and distasteful that the entity putting this pressure on our taxes would take any time in a council meeting to criticize the school district. Just in the past three years, city budgets have increased 32% while the RSU 71 budgets, including that 9% increase, have only gone up 12%. It just seemed so tone deaf to me, so I wrote what I wrote and meant what I meant. It’s the city that has a spending problem, not the schools.
Per https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm for July 2015 through the latest data available for June 2025.
1.7% is based on the actual budget figures, not the rounded figures cited in this article. I have corrected this post to state the actual 2025-26 city budget as 16.0 million, not 15.7 million cited in the email.
The official city budget in 2015-16 was higher than this, but it included the wastewater fund (which is self-supported by user fees), and as of recent years the city now handles the wastewater fund outside of the regular city budget, so my figures are the honest-to-goodness apples-to-apples comparison that needs to be made.