GREENFIELD — The city is injecting $641,548 from new growth into the fiscal year 2025 tax levy, surpassing a $400,000 projection and marking the highest annual increase in new growth in more than four years.

The tax levy’s added new growth in FY25 follows $303,523 added in FY24, $406,774 added in FY23, $372,965 in FY22 and $265,308 in FY21.

“We identified new growth early on as an opportunity for fiscal improvement,” Mayor Ginny Desorgher said in a statement. “I am proud of the Board of Assessors for executing this important initiative. This new growth will be an essential component to the city’s finances.”

According to Chief Assessor Randy Austin, the new growth spike arose from the Assessor’s Office’s efforts to collect personal property taxes from businesses that had not been paid in the past.

With help from the personal property appraisal and valuation consulting company Real Estate Research Consultants, Austin said the city was able to collect personal property taxes from 91 businesses in Precinct 5 that had previously not been billed. Although the inventory project cost roughly $45,000, Austin said it uncovered about $240,000 in new growth.

Approximately $200,000 of the city’s new growth, Austin added, came from construction.

“It is our responsibility to know about every business in town, and really, in every town. You should be able to go to the Assessor’s Office and say, ‘Give me a list of your businesses,’ and they should have about 90% of them on there, if [they’re] good,” Austin said. “This is an inventory that needed to be done. My board members helped to verify that by going out and walking the streets with a list of businesses.”

Among some of the city’s greatest streams of personal property tax revenue, Austin said, are large energy companies such as Eversource, which Austin said is an $83 million account that brought in about $200,000 in new growth this year.

Austin said he hopes to use this year’s spike in new growth to lower taxes from $20.39 per $1,000 valuation to less than $20 when the city votes to set the tax rate for FY25. He went on to say that a tax reduction would come as a needed break for Greenfield residents, who have been impacted by post-pandemic inflation and increased property value assessments of 27% during the last two years.

“I want values to go down because I raised values so much in the last two years that I feel like the citizens of Greenfield need the break, and yes, it’s what’s going on in the market, but it was a huge increase,” Austin said. “This year, I raised the land value a little bit, and I raised some of the building values. … I did a moderate increase to those — very, very minimal, because I was trying to minimize the impact.”

At its Wednesday night meeting, City Council voted against implementing a split tax rate, or redistributing the tax burden between residential and commercial properties.

In the council’s discussions on whether to implement a split rate, Chuck Green, a member of the Board of Assessors, explained that doing so would cause a very minor tax reduction for homeowners, with a proportionately much larger tax increase for commercial property owners.

“The problem, in a nutshell, is the industrial and commercial value is much lower in aggregate than the residential value. It’s more than a three-to-one ratio,” Green said. “If we put more of the split on commercial [and] industrial, it’ll make residential taxes go down an extremely small amount, but it will make the commercial industrial taxes go up an extremely large amount.”

Precinct 3 City Councilor Michael Mastrototaro added that the expected residential FY25 tax rate of $19.95 — if a split rate putting an additional 10% burden on commercial landowners were to be put into effect — would be reduced to only $19.29; whereas, the industrial and commercial tax rates would rise from $19.95 to $21.95.

Austin said he hopes that residents will bring their tax questions to the Assessor’s Office in January, when residential property owners have the most time to dispute their tax bills.

“That’s when you have 30 days to apply for an abatement if you feel that your value is not correct,” Austin said. “I can make a mistake, and it’s up to the owner to correct it if that’s the case. But understanding how the tax bill works, and the difference between preliminary and actual, and the significance of January, is important.”

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.