Representative Parsons urges keeping 70/30 PILOT split; committee declines amendment after staff briefing

Representative Joseph Parsons offered a late amendment to strike bill language that would change town pilot-payment allocations (described in committee discussion as moving from a 70/30 split to a 75/25 split). Parsons said the change would shift funds away from a town-level share and that, in his view, the underlying problem is underpayment to towns rather than the split itself: "the problem is on the back end, and we're not giving our towns the correct amount of money. We're short changing our towns," he said.

The committee then received a technical overview from Jeff Burnett of the Joint Fiscal Office on how pilot payments work and how the bill’s language would affect fund balances. Burnett described the A and R (land) pilot payments as an "eighty-twenty split between the general fund and ANR" and said the FY26 estimate for those payments was about $2.7 million, roughly $2.3 million from the general fund and a $421,500 interdepartmental transfer from ANR. He also explained that ANR is statutorily required to recommend adjustments to the base land payment every three to five years and that the agency raised the base payment 1.29% in 2022 for FY23.

Burnett and other staff explained that building pilot payments (state-owned buildings on local grand lists) use insurance-replacement values provided by a state contractor, multiplied by the common level of appraisal (CLA) to produce a taxable-equivalent base; that calculation can make pilot payments appear higher or lower relative to locally assessed values depending on the municipal grand list and the insurance values. The committee discussed differences in how land and building pilot payments are calculated and whether a change in the statutory split would materially affect the pilot special fund balance available to address future payments and corrections.

Staff presented rough fiscal estimates: with a 75% allocation to towns (the change Parsons opposed), the pilot special fund share was estimated at about $14,000,000 against the governor’s recommended FY26 appropriation of about $12,200,000; with a 70% allocation to towns, staff estimated the pilot special fund share at roughly $16,820,000 (yielding an estimated $4,000,000-plus additional cushion above anticipated spending under the governor’s recommendation). Burnett noted these figures include towns that approved local-option taxes before the modeling cutoff but do not account for future adoptions.

After discussion, the committee conducted a straw poll on Parsons’s amendment; the chair announced that the straw poll found the amendment unfavorable and said, "That looks 11 to me," reflecting the chair’s count. The committee did not adopt the amendment, and members agreed to pursue further review of pilot calculations and the underlying formulas in a dedicated follow-up — staff flagged an issue brief and an appendix with an example (Randolph) as reference material.

Ending: committee members asked staff to prepare additional detail on pilot calculations (land vs. building), to provide the issue brief and appendices, and to return with options that would allow the committee to address inequities without creating unintended fiscal consequences.