Committee reviews Rutland charter bill H.504 that sets new taxes for fire and police equipment and revises procurement rules

Legislative counsel Tucker Anderson told the Ways & Means committee April 29 that H.504, a package of charter amendments for the City of Rutland, adds two recurring charter tax rates to fund fire and police equipment and makes technical and procurement-policy changes to the city charter.

Anderson told committee members, “You have in front of you the amendments to the Charter of the City of Rutland, H.504,” and described the measure as largely technical cleanup with two specific rate increases. “Taxes required for the replacement for fire equipment is being raised from 0.0175 to 0.0225 on the dollar of the grand list,” he said. He also said the bill establishes a new base tax of 0.018 on the dollar of the grand list for police equipment.

The amendments include a clause repeated across subdivisions that lets the city’s legal voters authorize a higher amount at a meeting warned for that purpose; Anderson said that language appears in each affected subdivision. He also flagged a drafting error — an extra trailing zero in the police rate expression — that Legislative Counsel’s statutory-revision authority can correct as a manifest error. Anderson said another correction will be needed because the charter already contained a provision (Subdivision 7) authorizing use of a related tax for police equipment; the mayor asked that the older, duplicate language be struck.

Beyond the equipment taxes, Anderson said the charter bill removes a fixed-dollar threshold for required bidding and instead ties the bidding requirement to the city’s purchasing policy. He said the purchasing threshold in the existing charter was “significantly lower than pretty much every other municipality in the state.” The bill also makes a change to the composition of the board of commissioners for the city’s redevelopment authority, Anderson said.

Anderson explained the charter package contains two separate voter questions: the redevelopment-authority changes were approved by voters in November, while the tax rates and purchasing provisions were decided on Town Meeting Day. Committee discussion focused on cleaning the drafting quirks and whether to convert tax-rate language to the more common “per $100 of assessed value” construct; one committee member said, “I’ve just sort of talked myself towards let’s wait,” and the committee agreed to postpone a vote until Tucker circulated the housekeeping amendments.

No formal committee vote on H.504 was taken at this meeting. Anderson said he would draft the corrections the same day and the committee planned to reconvene to vote the next morning. Committee members asked for the certified charter packet and Anderson said he would place it on a shared site for the committee’s review.

Directions and next steps recorded in the meeting were limited to drafting and returning with specified corrections: removal of the duplicate police-equipment provision, elimination of the superfluous trailing zero, and optional reformatting of rate expressions. The committee set no legislative deadline at the meeting and did not take a final action on H.504.