When it comes to budgets, with the possibility that the town will take hundreds of thousands of dollars more from taxpayers than even the Town Council and Budget Committee want, the numbers can become confusing. It helps to narrow the question down and answer the pieces one by one. For this post, I’ll address the question of whether both budgets use the new casino gambling revenue for tax relief.
They do not. As the following chart shows, Budget #2 will collect almost exactly the same amount of tax as the town is collecting this year. That means it is spending every penny of casino revenue. Budget #1, on the other hand, lowers taxes by $562,218, which is direct tax savings from the casino’s revenue.
Both budgets will lower the tax rate, but that is because the total value of property in the town went up, so the tax burden is distributed more broadly. However, in future years, the casino revenue will already be built into the taxes.
