I decided recently that I want to add a second night of tango lessons each week. But the instructor who taught the series I was interested in decided to shift it from a day that I am free to a day that I am busy.
Mandatory training day. One down, three to go.
I sliced my thumb while cleaning the new food processor after attempting to make gluten free cheez-its.
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New couple moved in down the street, they have a German Sheperd. We have been out on a walk a few times and that thing is out on its retractable lead acting like a typical poorly trained dog jumping up and down and barking at us from across the street while it’s owner yells at it and does little to correct the behavior. Anyway, walking out the door this morning for a 6am walk, neighbor gal is walking the dog off leash. Straight out from our front door. It’s staring at us, takes a few steps towards us, she calls it back, it comes towards her, it stops, looks back at us, rinse, repeat for the next 60 seconds or so until they get beyond our driveway. At no point did she make any attempt to leash the dog to control the situation. We went about our walk the other way.
Anyway, so since we have the neighborhood facebook group, I privately message the husband (she does not seem to be in the group)…“hi neighbor, can you please follow the leash laws. We were a bit surprised by the situation this morning. I’m not anti-dog, but have been bitten multiple times in this neighborhood.”
Got a one word response “yes”.
I guess we won’t be besties anytime soon.
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My dishwasher is acting up again.
ETA: Repair guy not available until next week. Gonna handwash over the next few days, which I don’t mind doing.
ETA #2: Control panel is pooched and the dishwasher is so old they don’t make replacement parts any more. Time to go shopping!
******in’ mud dauber wasps built some tube nests under one of my awnings!!!
I find them in the patio umbrella, sometimes under the eaves. I always have a can of wasp spray handy, those are some pesky bastards.
I gave the tubes a good bashing: we’ll see what’s left when it’s daylight.
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Grocery stores have been putting out Halloween candy and chips already: can we just do back to school first??? Sheesh!!! 
Back to school season was the last month of school.
That’s the back-to-school candy!
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That’s what the manager at the grocery store said!!! 
Y’all are just getting that now? We were there a month ago!
I was doing some research for property taxes and found an article about a state audit of property taxes that said one problem with the current system is that commercial property doesn’t increase in value like residential.
So I looked into it a little more and found that since 2003 (the year the new Walmart was built) my homes value for tax purposes has increased 211% from just over 150K to just under 500K. During this same time period the Walmart property has increased 68% from about 13M to just under 22M.
…and that phenomenon has been aggravated recently.
In Connecticut generally/oversimplifying local governments are obliged to have one mill rate when it comes to property taxes, regardless of the nature of the property being taxed. It doesn’t matter whether a property is residential, agricultural, or commercial – it’s the same rate.
Local governments are also obliged to undertake revaluations on a prescribed schedule (once every five years, with the towns staggered to smooth out the demands on/for vendors), and with prescribed rules over what data is to be considered in conducting the revaluation.
In my town, the most recent revaluation took place a couple of years ago, informed by real estate transactions that spanned pandemic lockdowns and the time thereafter…and in a time when several new warehouses were constructed, some because Amazon wanted them for their logistics, and some built speculatively.
As you might expect, residential valuations jumped, but commercial valuations dropped slightly.
Combine that with the mix of property types and no particular shocks in municipal budget…phased in over two years, my property tax bill is up over 40%, while Amazon’s is down 1%.
Retirees in town were particularly pissed. Sadly that pissedness wasn’t enough to prompt legislative action on this problem with the state’s property tax system.
Our state has county assessors who do the valuation of properties. It used to be every 3 years or so but they are doing it nearly every year now. Property mill rates are set each year so that each taxing entity gets the same $$ on existing properties as they did last year and the only increase comes in ‘new’ construction. So as the overall value of properties for our city increase our mill rate goes down. So if total valuation was 100M and you had a rate of 0.0005 then you theoretically received 50K. If next year that total valuation went up to 110M then your rate would go down to 0.0004545.
If we want/need more money we have to increase the rate over what the county certifies and we have to advertise and have a public hearing so most taxing entities are loath to do that unless it is required. My city went over 15 years without raising their rate. But since the valuation changed residential taxes went up a lot more than commercial taxes did. It’s a bit infuriating for elected officials and for home owners when residential is going up faster than commercial valuations. And a lot of it is that there are lots of residential sales to have comparisons for new valuations while not a lot of commercial sales to have comparisons for.
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we have one million rate, then residential pays one times, commercial pays two, agricultural pays .25.
which is fine, it just means properties have to be evaluated against market rate once in a while. which, they aren’t.
One thing to add. Residential pays on 55% of the market value while commercial pays on 100% of market value. But since that is how is has been for as long as I can remember, it doesn’t change the issue at hand.
I can see that my assessment has gone up about 70% since I bought while the tax paid has gone up about 50%. No real idea what is driving that difference but realize that I should be more informed.
The whole car buying process is ridiculous. Especially if you want a car that’s somewhat in demand. I feel like I’m going insane.
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