Will Your Car Taxes Go Up?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Car tax changes in Connecticut. Will you be affected?

Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'll just x out of this right now?

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Yes, I mean how long?

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Yes, yes, I will, you will, we all?

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Will you know? The state legislature they've been tinkering with
the formula that creates our car taxes here in Connecticut.
As a result of those changes, some people's bills are
going to go down, some people's are going to go up.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Spend sheer madness in city Hall this morning.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Sheer madness is how New Britain Mayor Aaron Stewart described
the scene at her office on Wednesday morning.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
You know, you walk into work and there's a line
of people already waiting at the assessor's office window with
their car tax bills in their hand, with a million
different questions.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Stuart said the questions she faced all centered on a
similar complaint.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
What we're seeing today is a lot of people coming
in with their bills enhancing. How come I'm paying you know,
sixty five seventy eighty dollars more than what I was
last year on my car that is twenty plus years old,
The mayor said.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
The likely culprit behind those higher bills is a series
of changes to the car tax system passed by the
state legislature. Gone are the days of blue book valuations.
Legislators abandoned that system in the last few years after
the pandemic drove up used car prices. Instead, they created.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
A pandemic solarism, which.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Uses MSRP as a baseline tied to a depreciation schedule.
That new system could be the root cause of those
higher bills, particularly for drivers with older cars, but that's
not the whole story. Even though some taxpayers have seen
their bills go up, the changes have caused others to
see their bills go down, meaning some municipalities are now

(01:36):
losing revenue. There's been grandlest reductions for the majority of
our towns. That's the head of policy for a group
that represents the interests of Connecticut municipalities. That overall decrease
in car tax revenue under the new MSRP based system
has alarmed town leaders who use that cash to fund
schools and public works. The state legislature acted on that

(01:56):
panic this year from these schools changed to the system
allowing towns to tax.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
A higher How do how do we start at DMV
and wind up at schools?

Speaker 1 (02:06):
How robing Peter to pay Paul all over again. I'm
sick of hearing. Yeah, well, things changed during the pandemic.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Okay, that's over, so we could go back to the
old way. Okay, did used car prices get checked up
during that's they're not now, so we could go back

Speaker 1 (02:26):
Because man, did we make some wide spread changes during
that year.