More Good Financial News for Richmond

By Cynthia Drummond for BRVCA
November 15th 2023

RICHMOND – After learning that Richmond’s property taxes are not, as one Town Council member has continued to claim, the second-highest in Rhode Island, the BRVCA looked at other indicators of the town’s fiscal health and how Richmond compares to other cities and towns.

The BRVCA explored several data sets in a report by the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, the nonprofit research organization frequently cited by councilor Michael Colasante.

We also looked at federal census data and spoke with the Executive Director of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns. The consensus is that Richmond is in sound fiscal health and is doing a good job of keeping expenses low.

On the Rocks?

At the July 21 special Town Council meeting to vote on hiring Town Planner Talia Jalette, Colasante argued that council members should be more involved in hiring town employees and criticized the manner in which the town was running.

“I just don’t know how the Town Hall’s been operating like this for the last 10 years,” he said. “That’s why I ran, to try and straighten some of these things out. Because again, like I said, the ship is going to rocks along the shore because we’re the Number Two taxed town in the state and it’s the policies of this town that are bringing that ship to the rocks and I want to see it stopped.”

At the Aug. 15 Town Council meeting, Finance Director Laura Kenyon attempted to counter Colasante’s assertion that Richmond’s tax burden is the state’s second-highest in Rhode Island.

Referring to the RIPEC report, Kenyon said,

“I took the RIPEC property taxation report and only for the residential rate, because we have one rate and a lot of cities and towns have three to five different tax rates,” she said.

“We were 11th in Fiscal year 2022, 7th in ’23 and now, we also called every city and town for their ’23 and ’24 and we’re 17th. We’re actually tied for 16th, but we only have one tax rate that ties with East Providence, which has three tax rates.”

Kenyon took the opportunity to caution councilors against citing figures without fully understanding their context.

 “…when you’re using metrics of states and cities and towns, you have to understand the calculation and the discrepancies that could happen,” she said. “You have to understand what other towns have, three- tiered or two-tier. You have to understand if they’ve been revaluated for tax levies. There are many things that go into the consideration, so as we state statistics, we should understand what we’re stating as well.”

The RIPEC Report

RIPEC Research Manager Justine Oliva talked about the sources of data and how the report is prepared.

“RIPEC produced a report on property tax using the most recent available data a few years ago,” Oliva said. “We put that out on January 25th, 2022. The most recent available property tax data that we had was in regard to tax year 2021 at that point, I believe. Since then, two separate tax rate changes have been applied, and so, you see changes in cities and towns not only in their tax rates but cities and towns have enacted other changes in regard to their property tax structure. They’re seeing revaluations, so in a lot of ways, the data in that report is old.”

Richmond did have a revaluation in 2023, which reduced the property tax rate substantially, from $20.58 to $14.76.

Colasante has described the property tax burden as a combination of several factors.

“The tax rate is just that, the rate at which we’re being taxed,” he told Kenyon at the Aug. 15 council meeting. “You’re correct when you said that we were 11th. The tax burden adds the evaluations to the equation, which makes Richmond the second-highest burdened tax town in the state.”

The data for RIPEC’s residential property tax burden chart do show Richmond as having the second-highest in the state. However, those calculations are based on a median home value of $319,000 in Fiscal Year 2022, which, Kenyon said, is higher than the median home value in Richmond.

“The chart refers to the tax burden on a home in Fiscal [Year] ’22 for an assessment of $319,000,” she said. “It’s one assessment times the tax rate. They’ve used that schedule as what they consider to be the median assessed value of a home. … I checked with the assessor, and…the median household was $287,000 in Richmond, and understanding what is in a report and what is being referred to, you have to look and understand our median household assessment wasn’t the $319,000.”

Oliva noted that RIPEC is planning to update the information in its report when the state releases its latest figures.

“We are talking about, practically, what are you, as a resident homeowner, actually paying, so that’s why we use this example where we pick the median price home from that period,” she said. “…We do plan to revisit this report this winter, when the new data is released,” she said. “The new data – the Division of Municipal Finance will be releasing the data for the current year soon.”

Administrative Expenses

The RIPEC report contains a chart, prepared in 2021, that ranks municipalities’ administration costs. Those costs include police, administration, public works and parks and recreation.

Richmond’s municipal per capita expenditures, not including education, were $792, the second-lowest in the state. Only Exeter had lower expenses.

BRVCA asked Ernie Almonte the former Auditor General for the State of Rhode Island, to comment on Richmond’s ranking in the report. Almonte currently serves as the Executive Director of the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns.

“If I was the leader of that community, I’d be proud that my expenditures were that low and near the bottom of costs of running an efficient community,” he said.

The Census

There is more good financial news for Richmond: The U.S. Census Bureau shows the median household income in Rhode Island, from 2017 to 2021, was $74,489. In Richmond, the median household income was $104,493, putting the town 10th from the top on a list ranking 39 communities in the state. In addition, the per capita income, $44,904, puts Richmond in 13th place on the list.