FARMINGTON — Sometime in early October, a survey will reach Farmington mailboxes, inboxes and phone screens asking residents, among other things, which town services they would be willing to pay more for. Nine months after that, on July 1, 2027, those same residents will open a tax bill built on the first reassessment of their property since 2022.
One resident saw that sequence coming and said so at the podium.
On July 28, before the Town Council voted to authorize the agreement with the firm that is now building the survey, Tim Kelly, a resident of the town's Unionville section, used his public comment to ask the council to hold the survey until after July 2027.
"An effective survey not only asks what you might like, but also what you're willing to pay for," Kelly said. "And Farmington taxpayers have not yet been required to step up to pay for projects approved or constructed in previous years. That credit card bill will hit home on July 1st of next year."
The official minutes of that meeting record his point in the town's own words: taxpayers "will not fully experience the financial impacts of recently approved capital projects, increased debt service, and the upcoming property revaluation until that time."
The chair thanked him. The council moved to the next item. Nothing on the recording of that meeting answers him, and when the council spent all of September 1 building that survey question by question, the revaluation did not come up once.
The town has been planning around the revaluation since spring
The revaluation is not news to anyone in town government. It has been shaping decisions for months.
In May, a $1,669,896 state windfall landed in Farmington's lap and the council had to decide how much of it to spend holding down this year's tax rate. It applied part and held $835,000 back for the year ahead. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski was direct about why.
"I think it's going to be a tough year," she said of the revaluation, "and using part of it next year to help the tax rate, I think is the intent, too: that you're helping it this year, and you're going to help it next year."
The council set the rate at 27.36 mills and kept the rest in reserve. A mill is one dollar of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value, which is the figure the revaluation is about to change for every property in town.
In July, when the Ad Hoc Fire Station Committee brought the council a $30 million to $35 million plan to replace or rebuild three fire stations, Council Member Dave Wlodkowski raised the same calendar. A town-wide revaluation lands next year, he noted, and asking residents to approve tens of millions in new borrowing in the same cycle their assessments change could push that referendum from spring to November.
So the town has treated the revaluation as a reason to hold money back and as a reason to move a borrowing question to a later ballot. It has not, on any public record the Mercury has reviewed, been raised as a factor in when to ask residents what they are willing to fund.
What is actually coming, and when
Farmington's assessor's office is unambiguous about the mechanics. A town-wide revaluation of all real estate is underway now. New assessments will reflect 70 percent of fair market value as of October 1, 2026, the ratio Connecticut towns use to convert what a property would sell for into the number the tax bill is calculated from. Tyler Technologies is collecting property data across town through this year.
Owners who want to argue with their new number get one-on-one informal reviews with a Tyler reviewer in December 2026. Formal appeals go to the Board of Assessment Appeals in February 2027, with applications due by February 20.
Then the office states the consequence in one sentence: "Assessments derived from the revaluation will first be used for tax bills July 1, 2027."
The state's schedule says the same thing from the other direction. Connecticut's Office of Policy and Management lists Farmington's revaluation years as 2026, 2030 and 2034. The last one was October 1, 2022.
The assessor's office is also careful to say what a revaluation does and does not do. "By itself, a revaluation is revenue neutral, although it will cause tax burden shifts among properties. Some owners will see increases while others will see decreases, and yet others will remain approximately the same."
That is Kelly's point, expressed by the town: the total the town collects does not change, but who pays which share of it does. And in early October, when the survey goes out, no property owner in Farmington will have seen their own new number. The informal reviews do not begin until December.
The schedule is not entirely the council's to set
There is a straightforward reason the survey is going out this fall, and it has nothing to do with tax bills.
The survey is not primarily a Town Council instrument. It is the public input phase of the Plan of Conservation and Development, the document that sets Farmington's land use and development priorities for ten years and that guides zoning decisions, open space acquisition and where the town encourages or discourages growth. Connecticut requires it under Section 8-23 of the General Statutes, and the Town Plan and Zoning Commission, not the council, must prepare and adopt it. Farmington's current plan expires November 15, 2027. The new one is the 2028 to 2038 edition, and the town's target is to have it updated by December 2027.
Waiting until after July 2027, as Kelly asked, would leave roughly four months to survey the town, run public workshops, draft a ten-year plan, circulate it for a 65-day review by the Town Council and by CRCOG, the regional planning body Farmington belongs to, hold a public hearing and adopt it. Whether that is possible is a judgment for the commission and its consultants. Nobody at the council table has been asked to make it in public.
The council folded its own strategic plan survey into the land use plan's survey deliberately, at its July 14 meeting, to avoid asking residents the same questions twice and to hold down the cost of outreach. The consequence of that efficiency is that the council's questions about what residents will pay for now ride on a statutory clock set by a different body.
None of that was said on September 1. The meeting ran about an hour and forty-five minutes and produced a long list of things council members want to ask residents about, from bus shelters and sidewalks to what the town should do with the Farmington River. It did not produce a sentence about whether October is the right month to ask a town what it can afford.
What the record does not settle
Kelly's second claim, the surge in debt service, is harder to pin down than the revaluation, and the town's published budget does not resolve it.
The adopted 2026-27 budget carries debt service of $13,985,252, up 1.96 percent over the prior year. That is not a surge, and it is consistent with Kelly's framing that the bill has not arrived yet. The town's seven-year capital plan does project a substantially heavier borrowing year ahead. And on April 30, voters were asked to authorize $18,339,152 in new borrowing: $14,339,152 for ventilation and air conditioning at all four elementary schools, and $4,000,000 for roads and drainage.
The school half passed. The Board of Education was told at its May 11 meeting that the referendum had produced "a yes to adding the AC units to all four of our elementary schools." The Mercury has not been able to confirm the outcome of the road and drainage question; the town's referendum results posting has since come down, and the certified totals do not appear in any public record we have been able to locate.
What the town's published budget documents do not contain is any projection of what the borrowing already authorized will add to debt service in the year beginning July 1, 2027. That number, which is the whole of Kelly's argument, is not in the public record yet.
The dates, in order
The survey oversight committee, chaired by Council Member Patti Boye-Williams, meets three times this month to settle the questions. The survey goes live in early October. Assessment values are set as of October 1. Informal value reviews with Tyler run in December, the same month the consultants bring the survey results back to the council. Appeals close February 20. The new bills go out July 1.
Residents will be asked what they are willing to pay for in the first of those months, and find out what they are paying in the last.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A revaluation is an exercise in deciding what a thing is worth as of one particular day in October. Farmington Storage takes a simpler view: whatever it is worth, it should not be spending the winter in a damp garage. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's budget cycle long enough to know that "revenue neutral" is a phrase doing a great deal of quiet work. He read the assessor's frequently asked questions all the way to the bottom. Second coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the oversight committee that meets on a Friday, the public comment nobody answered, the assessor's page that tells you exactly what is going to happen to your tax bill if you scroll far enough. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Always last to breaking news, thorough about everything else. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰