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Committee hears overview of Vermont’s Current Use program, fiscal impact on education fund
Summary
Ezra Holben, fiscal analyst, told the Ways & Means Committee that Vermont’s Current Use program reduces landowners’ property taxes by replacing market assessments with an annually set use value, and that those savings show up as foregone municipal and education revenues.
Ezra Holben, fiscal analyst, gave the committee a high‑level overview of Vermont’s Use Value Appraisal program (commonly called Current Use) and its interaction with the education fund.
Holben said Current Use was established in 1978 to encourage preservation of agricultural and forest land and to lower property taxes for participating landowners. “You can think of those as property‑tax or education‑tax expenditures,” he told the committee, explaining that property owners who enroll pay taxes based on a use value (set per acre by an advisory board) rather than the assessed market value.
Holben walked members through how use value is calculated: enrolled acreage × an annually set use value per acre × the municipality’s Common Level of Appraisal (CLA) yields the enrolled value that is taxed. He provided the values published…
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