New Hampshire’s Tax Problem Is the State’s Fiscal Mullet

Freedom in the front and property taxes in the back.

For years, property taxes in small-town New Hampshire did what people expect property taxes to do: they crept a little, dipped a little, annoyed everybody pretty evenly, and generally behaved like an old pickup with a sticky gas pedal.

Not good, not fair, but at least familiar.

Then came 2023, and in Ossipee the whole thing stopped feeling like ordinary tax drift and started feeling like someone hit refresh on the town. Because that was the year the town went through a court-ordered, town-wide revaluation that brought assessments to market value as of April 1, 2023.

The town even told residents that because of the revaluation, tax bills could be decreased, flat, or increased.

And that same year, the town’s annual report said Ossipee engaged Avitar Associates in a five-year contract as its new assessor. Today, the town’s own assessing page says Ossipee contracts with Avitar Associates to provide and maintain the town’s assessment data.

Now here is the part that should make people put their coffee down for a second: Avitar says it provides software and/or assessing services to more than 150 cities and towns throughout New Hampshire. In other words, this is not some little side program tucked in a filing cabinet behind the town clerk’s desk. This is a statewide system with a very long reach.

So no, the issue is not just “Ossipee had an assessor and then a robot showed up wearing bifocals.” The issue is bigger than that.

The issue is that 2023 became a new baseline year. A reset. A fresh starting point for values. And once a new baseline gets dropped into the system, every homeowner gets to meet the same old New Hampshire tradition: the bill goes up, while your paycheck mostly just stands there blinking.

That is the part nobody should pretend is normal.

Because when taxes rise off a new assessed base, the town can always say, very calmly and professionally, “Well, that is just what the market says now.” But regular people do not live in “the market.” They live in houses. They buy groceries. They pay electric bills. They try to keep fuel in the tank, food in the fridge, and maybe — if the stars align and the radiator holds — a little money left over at the end of the month.

And yet the tax bill keeps acting like everyone in town secretly got a promotion.

They did not.

That is what makes this hit so hard. A higher assessment on paper does not mean a family has more cash. It just means the number used to justify the tax bill got bigger. The house did not suddenly become a waterfront mansion. The road did not turn into Rodeo Drive. The yard did not sprout a polo field. But on paper, congratulations, everyone is apparently doing fabulous.

Ossipee’s own tax-rate page shows a string of revaluations over the years — 1994, 2003, 2010, 2015, 2019, and 2023. But 2023 stands out because it was not just another quiet adjustment year. It was the year of the court-mandated revaluation and the year the town moved into a new contract-assessment structure with Avitar.

And that matters, because once property data, parcel records, values, and map-linked assessment information are run through a large outside system, the ordinary taxpayer is no longer just arguing with one local judgment call. They are arguing with a framework. A database. A value structure. A process that can feel less like “tell us what is wrong” and more like “please take a number and complain in an orderly fashion.”

That is not transparency. That is customer service with a tax rate.

To be clear, technology itself is not the villain. A computer is a tool. Software is a tool. Data systems are tools. The problem is what happens when those tools become the unquestioned middleman between the land, the homeowner, and the bill. If the underlying records are off, if the mapped assumptions are off, if the baseline is inflated, then all the software in the world just helps do the wrong thing faster.

Which is why this matters beyond one town.

If more than 150 New Hampshire communities are using the same company for software and/or assessing services, then this is not just an Ossipee story. This is a statewide taxpayer story.

Because once enough towns use the same kind of system, people stop asking basic questions. They assume the number must be right because it came from a screen. It looks official. It prints nicely. It has map-lot-sub-lot dignity. But official-looking is not the same thing as affordable, and it sure is not the same thing as fair.

At the end of the day, this is the simplest version of the problem:

Our tax bills are changing faster than our ability to pay them.

And when that happens, people have every right to ask whether the system is measuring reality — or just standardizing pain.

If 2023 was the year values were reset, then taxpayers should not be told to smile and admire the efficiency. They should be asking what that reset really did, who benefited from it, how it was built, and why ordinary working people are expected to absorb the difference like they have a money tree growing behind the shed.

Because in New Hampshire, the state motto may be Live Free or Die.

But lately, the property-tax version is starting to feel more like:

Assess High and Good Luck.