News Desk

Property Taxes Go Sky High in New Hampshire

For decades New Hampshire has been regarded as a tax haven, one whose elected officials actively advocated limited government. As one of the few states in the country with neither an income tax nor a sales tax, residents of the Granite State aspire to Live Free or Die, or so the state’s motto goes.

Yet there is a notorious downside to this arrangement, one that landowners know all too well. Property taxes have long generated a disproportionate percentage of the state’s tax revenues. Now, thanks to ever increasing costs, New Hampshire’s property taxes are on the rise again, and the rationale is a new and cruel scheme: the view tax.Technically, there is no tax associated with the vistas or views visible from a property. The view tax is in fact a view factor, one of many used to compute a property’s assessed value. But no matter the terminology, residents as well as out of state property owners are up in arms as town officials across the state fan out to quantify and tax the state’s gorgeous vistas.According to the Washington Post, Bennet Nicholson’s view of the Connecticut River Valley sent his property value skyrocketing from $98,000 in 2002 to $273,000 the following year and doubled his property taxes. Not surprisingly, Nicholson sold his house and moved to Canada.

One assessor indicated that the maximum value added to a property’s assessment has increased ten-fold over the last decade. In the 1990s, the maximum added assessment was approximately $20,000. Nowadays $200,000 or more is a common figure.

-- Eric O’Keefe