MADISON — Following the recent $150 million plunge in the tax value of Madison Paper Industries that caught town officials off guard, residents will vote Wednesday on whether to abolish the town’s Board of Assessors and transfer responsibility for determining property value for tax purposes and the tax rate to selectmen.

The Board of Assessors’ decision has generated criticism and concern among residents and elected officials who feel that more could have been done to prevent the financial strain that the drop in value has put on the town.

“That was the catalyst for this,” said Jack Ducharme, vice-chairman of the Board of Selectmen. “The townspeople voted in June for the budget, and then in August the assessors made their determination and basically reduced the revenue that was supporting the budget people had already approved by $1.5 million.”

The special town meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Madison Area Junior High School auditorium.

In June, residents approved a $3.26 million town budget only to find out two months later that the town would be losing about 26 percent of its property tax revenue — some of which goes toward funding the budget — with the devaluation of the mill. Previously valued at $229.7 million, the mill is now worth $80 million.

According to a new Maine law passed in 2014, assessors are required to maintain confidentiality regarding assessments for a major taxpayer requesting a change in valuation.

Robert Hagopian, a member of the Board of Assessors, responded to the vote by saying that “people will blame anyone they can for the drop in valuation at the mill.”

“Anytime there’s a change that people don’t like, they’re going to blame someone for it, and this time that’s the board of assessors,” he said.

In October, selectmen received a petition signed by the required percentage of voters asking that the town abolish the Board of Assessors and give those duties to selectmen. The board currently sets the tax rate and is responsible for property tax assessments.

“There are many towns in central Maine that do not have boards of assessors,” Ducharme said. “The selectmen act as the board of assessors, and usually they subcontract with an assessing firm to do that.”

Selectmen have also voted unanimously to support abolishing the Board of Assessors, Ducharme said. Whether or not the town will retain its assistant to the Board of Assessors, Bill Van Tuinen, is being considered with the possible change.

“There certainly is a need for some kind of professional assessment assistance,” he said. “But until the vote on the 25th is taken, I’m not comfortable saying anything as far as that’s concerned. The vote on the 25th is really just about the Board of Assessors.”

If selectmen had control over the tax rate and property assessments last year, they may have known there would be a large drop in the value of Madison Paper and may have budgeted more appropriately for the 2014-2015 year, Ducharme said.

“By law, the only thing that the Board of Assessors could tell us was that there was a significant and substantial reduction coming. So how do you quantify ‘significant and substantial?’ It means one thing to me, and another to you. We were anticipating a certain level of reduction, but when it was reduced by 65 percent, it was far more than we ever considered,” Ducharme said.

Giving over the board’s responsibilities to selectmen won’t change the fact that a decision needed to be made that ultimately reduced the value of the mill and raised taxes for residents, regardless of who made the decision, Hagopian said.

“If people read in the newspapers about how much paper mills are worth and how much they’re depreciating in value, there really would be no problem,” he said. “Taxes went up because the value of the mill went down, but that has nothing to do with the Board of Assessors. We can’t justify $229 million for a paper mill.”

Also on Wednesday the state Legislature’s Committee on Taxation will hold public hearings on two pieces of proposed legislation that may help offset the impact of the drop in value in Madison. The bills, proposed as emergency legislation, require that the current valuations of the towns of Madison and Skowhegan, which also saw a drop in value at Sappi Fine Paper, be used to calculate state funding to those communities.

The public hearings are scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday in room 127 of the State House in Augusta.

Rachel Ohm — 612-2368

rohm@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @rachel_ohm

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