Every tax is a pay cut.  Every tax cut is a pay raise. Citizens for Limited Taxation

Back in January, I met Arthur Ramos on Gilbert Street and discussed his complaint about his property tax bill. This encounter started my investigation into assessments in Framingham.   I acquired a copy of the assessments database for $85.00 from the town assesssor. Since this database did not contain a precinct number of the 19,902 properties, I had to make some 20,000 queries to the town's web site to fetch the precincts. The resulting database is a 3.5 MB text file, containing close to 20,000 lines each line contain 23 colon (:) separated entries describing each property in Framingham. Feel free to download a copy. I then wrote a Perl program to do my analysis of the database.  The program produces a 25 page full report, which contains a 7 page synopsis. It is said that property taxes are regressive but you may not clearly understand the meaning of the term. The bottom line is that the small (poor) land owners pay the brunt of the property taxes and ( any overrides) The smaller the lot you have, the more you pay in property taxes per square foot. Conversely, the larger the lot you have, the less you pay in property taxes per square foot.  Think clearly about this the next time you vote for an override. Click here for the full 25 page report Click here for the 7 page synopsis Left Click here and press SHIFT to download the 3.5 MB text database.

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