The vote decides how next year’s tax burden is split between homeowners and businesses — the first step in a sequence that has to finish before bills go out in December.

By John Barrella – The G.O.A.T. News

ROCHESTER — The Select Board will hold its fiscal 2027 tax classification hearing Monday night, opening the process that ends with tax bills in mailboxes by the end of December.

The hearing appears on the agenda under “People on the Agenda,” with the tax assessor presenting. It is a required annual step under Chapter 40, Section 56 of the General Laws, and it does not decide how much money the town raises. It decides who pays it.

At a classification hearing, the assessors present the town’s property values and the board votes on the residential factor — the division of the levy between residential property on one side and commercial, industrial and personal property on the other. Assessors generally bring sample tax bills and year-over-year comparisons so board members can see what each option does to an actual homeowner before they vote. The total raised is identical under every option. Only the distribution changes.

For a town like Rochester, where the commercial and industrial base is small relative to residential property, the practical range of that decision tends to be narrower than in a town with a large commercial tax base to shift onto. Residents watching Monday will learn what the assessors calculate that range to be this year.

The vote matters because nothing downstream can proceed without it. The classification decision feeds the town’s tax rate recap, the recap goes to the state Division of Local Services for review, and only after the state approves the rate can a community issue actual tax bills.

The calendar tightens at the end of the year. If actual bills miss the December 31 mailing date, payment due dates move with them — for semiannual communities, the balance shifts from April 1 to May 1 or thirty days after mailing, whichever comes later. The state has cautioned that a late rate creates “a temporary cash flow issue that could potentially necessitate short-term internal or external borrowing”, since property taxes make up roughly 62 percent of the average municipal budget. Money arriving later than the budget assumed has to be covered from somewhere.

Most communities leave little room. For fiscal 2025, the Bureau of Accounts approved the last tax rates on December 24. Two hundred sixty-two cities and towns filed their recaps within the final five weeks, and 158 were approved in the last three. From mid-November onward, the state’s average turnaround for a tax rate approval stretched to six days, up from one or two earlier in the fall.

Rochester is taking its step in September.

The agenda has one gap. Item B reads, in full, “EXECUTIVE SESSION.” It cites no statutory purpose and names no subject. The Open Meeting Law requires a meeting notice to list the topics the chair reasonably anticipates discussing, and insufficiently specific notice is the most common violation the Attorney General’s Division of Open Government identifies. The chair is separately required to state the purpose aloud before the board goes behind closed doors.

The notice was revised Thursday afternoon at 4:36 by the assistant town clerk, inside the 48-hour posting window — which excludes weekends — by about an hour and a half.

The rest of the night is lighter. The board will take up the warrant for the November 3 state election, the legal instrument that calls the election in Rochester. Two requests are listed: Holiday Helping Angels has asked to use the Town Hall conference room for a Christmas collection, and the Boy Scouts have asked for the Fair Grounds for the week before Thanksgiving.

Correspondence includes an Eversource notice of vegetation work planned for fall and winter at 141 Cranberry Highway, and an update on Old Rochester’s fiscal obligations to the Gateway Health Group. The agenda offers no further detail on either.

The board will also vote on its open session minutes from September 8, hear the town administrator’s report, and take board member comments and committee reports before public comment and adjournment.

The meeting begins at 6 p.m. in the Town Hall conference room at 1 Constitution Way, with a Zoom option. The notice says the meeting may be video and audio recorded.