My name is Dave and I'm a numbers addict. Nothing excites me more than a well-plotted Excel spreadsheet, and I've been known to spend hours rummaging through government budgets to make sure the figures add up.
So when I discovered recently that Kathy Myers and her team of experts in the Dutchess County Real Property Tax Service Agency had used the county's Web site to post annual tax rate and assessment data back to 1973, I felt like I had won the lottery.
Why should anyone care? Well, a lot of people probably don't care. But if you're a numbers addict like me – or if you want to do some cutting-edge analysis of government fiscal trends over more than three decades – this is an indispensable resource.
For example, would you have guessed that the assessed value of properties in Rhinebeck was just over $35 million in 1973? It's nearly $1.3 billion today. And with revaluation a hot topic these days in Dutchess County, you can get a sense for how the numbers fell in past revaluations because the documents include each town's ever-changing equalization rates.
If I've put you to sleep with my numbers reverie, I apologize, but check back here later and I'll try to distill some of the figures into a few trends that might raise a few eyebrows. And let me know you find anything interesting in your own research.
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1 comment:
The big question for those of us in the Town of Poughkeepsie is how the reval will affect our taxes for taxing districts which cover more than one Town - one Town participating in the reval and other not participating - such as Fairview Fire District and Hyde Park Central School District both of which have properties in both Towns.
This writer's opinion is that Hyde Park will get a free ride in 2008 - since it takes 2 or 3 years for equalization rates to catch up. Town of Poughkeepsie taxpayers will bear an added burden in 2008.
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