FARMINGTON — Four disabled veterans in Farmington would stop paying property tax on their homes under an ordinance change the Town Council sent to a public hearing on September 8. The town would give up roughly $9,900 a year to do it, and the state would not repay a dollar.
The council passed it to that hearing without discussion. The chair, Brian F.X. Connolly, asked whether anyone had questions for staff. Nobody did. The vote was unanimous.
Connecticut already requires every town to exempt the home of a veteran the Department of Veterans Affairs has rated 100 percent disabled. What Farmington is deciding is whether to extend that to veterans the VA pays at the 100 percent rate without rating them there, a group the state left to every town to accept or refuse on its own.
Who this is for
The exemption turns on three letters most people have never seen: TDIU, for total disability based on individual unemployability.
A veteran with a TDIU determination is not rated 100 percent disabled. The VA has instead found that a service-connected disability prevents them from holding what it calls substantially gainful employment, and it compensates them at the same level as a veteran who is rated 100 percent. Odd jobs, which the agency calls marginal employment, do not count against them.
The federal test has two halves. The veteran cannot hold a steady job that supports them financially because of a service-connected disability. And they must have either one service-connected disability rated at 60 percent or more, or two or more with at least one at 40 percent and a combined rating of 70 percent. A lower rating can qualify in some circumstances, including a veteran who is hospitalized often.
So Connecticut's mandatory exemption draws its line at a number, and TDIU veterans sit just outside it while being paid as though they were inside.
What it costs, and what nobody has said it costs
The four homes carry a combined assessed value of $359,720 on the 2025 grand list. Assessed value is not a sale price; it is the figure the town taxes, set as a fraction of market value under state law.
At Farmington's current rate of 27.36 mills, meaning $27.36 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value, those four properties generate a little under $9,900 a year. That is the figure the town manager gave the council, and it is the gross one.
It is not what the exemption would cost, because the four are not paying full freight now. They already hold a $5,250 exemption tied to a disability rating, under an older and smaller state-mandated break. Connecticut lets a town provide the TDIU exemption instead of that one, not on top of it. The town's actual cost is the gap between the two, and that number has not been said out loud. The report also does not make clear whether the $5,250 applies to each household or across all four, which changes the answer considerably.
What is not in doubt is who pays. Town Manager Kathleen Blonski was direct about it.
"This is a local option exemption. It's not mandated by the State of Connecticut, and the property tax loss that would result from the exemption is not reimbursed by the state," she said.
She said the town assessor had raised it as something the council might be interested in, gave her own read, and handed it back.
"It seems like it's a good thing to do. It's not very costly for the Town of Farmington, but again, that's a policy decision."
The part that depends on where you live
The legislature created this option in 2025, in Public Act 25-168, and towns have been able to adopt it since the 2025 assessment year. It did not require anyone to.
That means two veterans with identical VA determinations, living in neighboring towns, can get opposite answers. One town's council took the vote. The next one did not, or has not yet, or never will. The disability is the same. The tax bill is not.
How many towns have adopted it is not a question the state's own research answers. Three Office of Legislative Research reports cover this exemption and the municipal options attached to it. None of them carries a tally of which towns said yes.
The same act created a second municipal option: an equivalent exemption for the surviving spouses of active duty servicemembers killed in the line of duty. Farmington's agenda item names only the veterans and spouses article of the town code, and the ordinance text is not yet public, so whether the amendment reaches that second option is not something the September 8 record answers.
Towns adopting the TDIU exemption can also shape it. They may exempt up to two acres of the lot the house sits on, extend it to unmarried surviving spouses of veterans who died before October 1, 2025, or cap the exemption at the town's median residential assessed value. Which of those Farmington's amendment does will be in the ordinance language when it is published.
October 13
The September 8 vote did not grant anything. It scheduled the hearing at which the council will take up the ordinance, an amendment to Chapter 176 of the town code, the article covering property tax exemptions for qualifying veterans and their spouses, and at which the public can speak.
Four households are the subject of it, and none of them has been heard from. They are not named in any public document, they were not at the meeting so far as the record shows, and the entire discussion of what they should owe has so far been conducted by people who do not include them. October 13 is the first point at which that could change.
The hearing is at 7:05 p.m. in the Town Hall Council Chambers. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air, which is their way of saying the temperature and humidity are held at museum conditions. The Mercury spends a good deal of its time in the parts of the public record nobody has looked at in a while. Farmington Storage takes roughly the same view of a cardboard box. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to know that the shortest item on an agenda is not always the smallest one. He is on his fifth coffee. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the exemption four households will notice and nobody else will, the public act that made it optional, the hearing on a Tuesday in October that almost nobody will attend. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news" and we mean it, because by the time you read this somebody has read the statute. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰