Letter To Editor Letter To Editor Selectmen’s decision on revaluation termed problematic

The East Windsor Board of Selectmen’s decision to ignore the paid-for revaluation done last year seems based on a gamble that we will have a recession in 2023 that will somehow magically reduce the value of the residential homes and that will reduce everyone’s tax burden. There are several problems with this.

Unfortunately I have requested the revaluation data and been told it is only “raw” data and not available to us. Apparently it was available to the selectmen and I will have to rely on their statement that residential real estate values went up 40%. This is truly a large increase.

As a sidebar, the last time the town released to the public a breakdown of the real estate evaluations between residential and commercial/industrial was 2017. In that year residential made up about 60% of the real estate value.

So apparently over the past five years commercial/industrial has gone up only 10%, but it makes up about 40% of the valuation.

Here are the problems as I see them to waiting a year (now actually only 8 months or less) and hoping a new evaluation will change things for the better.

Over the past 12 months the real estate market has been conflicted. Every month the year over year percentage of resales has declined but oddly the average or median sales price of homes has gone up.

This has led to the paradox that the huge increases in home values is due to high end homes. You can be pretty sure that when our revaluations are up over 40% it is the result of the high end homes that are probably up even more than that.

My low-priced home, for instance ,only went up 16.5% over the past five