According to Tim O’Brien’s own blog he has released his plan for tax relief. This release was made through a “New Britain Democratic E-Letter.” Perhaps Mr. O’Brien was afraid that if he released this plan publicly, too many voters would realize that his “plan” is little more than empty promises.
This supposed “plan” consists of three points:
Enacting local senior property tax relief to increase relief provided under the current state-funded relief program and to extend relief to seniors whose incomes are modest but exceed current limits under the state program.
I’m not quite sure how Tim O’Brien plans on getting a program like this established when his slate has demonstrated little to no effort on creating such a program before. Furthermore, Tim O’Brien talks about extending programs beyond the limits of state programs, but as a state legislator it is O’Brien who is partially responsible for those limits. When did he fight as a state legislator to expand senior programs?
The second point of O’Brien’s “plan” is to:
Extend property tax relief to all homeowners by requiring owners of blighted buildings in the city to pay their fair share through a strong anti-blight assessment ordinance.
There are two problems with this proposal, the first is purely mathematical. Even if you assume that 5% of all properties in New Britain are blighted (which is an extreme overestimation) that means the remaining 95% of properties would only see $0.06 on every dollar of increased taxes paid by the blight owners. The second problem is that Tim O’Brien himself has no idea how much money as he could get. In the recent debate he stated “How much we can actually do we need to actually see once we implement it.” This is not a plan, this is an idea, and regardless of its merits or flaws it is disingenuous of Tim O’Brien to be promising tax relief when he has no idea if that the relief would be at all meaningful.
Finally O’Brien says he would:
Strongly advocate for state property tax reform.
You will be able to read more about Tim O’Brien and his work on tax reform later this week, since his latest mailing is full of misleading information about his tax record. But once you read about his ineffective leadership in the area of tax reform as a state legislator, who will believe that he will have any influence on what happens at the state capitol once he is mayor?
If you look at Mayor Stewart’s record on taxes then you will see that he has repeatedly lowered the mill rate. The reason he has done this was to help compensate for the forced re-evaluation which would have otherwise caused an astronomic increase in property taxes. Though in the end it would not have mattered to Tim O’Brien what happened with property taxes. He doesn’t own a home to tax.
