Dover’s Budget – Your Questions Answered

When one person asks a question, there are usually others wondering the same thing. Here are some of the most common questions I’ve heard about Dover’s budget — and my honest answers.

Why Do My Taxes Increase Every Year?

Costs increase over time due to inflation. Suppose we freeze growth in Dover, doing nothing new and only maintaining what we have — delivering the same amount of maintenance on a set schedule each year. In year one, the cost to maintain everything in Dover is $100. Assuming 3% inflation, in year two, the cost to do the exact same work rises to $103. In year three, that same work costs $106.09.

Since the above assumes that we’re not adding anything new, it means that we’re not adding any infrastructure that would support new taxable property value. Because the tax base remains stagnant, the city has no way to spread those rising inflationary costs across new residents or businesses.

In this scenario, the math gets painful:

• Without new development to subsidize the inflation of existing services, you are essentially paying more every year just to stand still.
• To cover the $106.09 needed in year three, the city must collect that extra $6.09 entirely from the existing taxpayers.
• Even if your home’s market value stays the same, the tax rate (the amount you pay per $1,000 of value) must increase to meet the new budget requirements.

This creates a compounding effect. If the town doesn’t grow its value faster than the rate of inflation, the tax bill for the average homeowner will inevitably climb, even if the level of service — like how often your street is plowed or your trash is collected — remains exactly the same.

In short, you aren’t paying more for better service. You’re paying more to maintain the status quo in an increasingly expensive economy.

For FY2027, Dover’s budget increased by 2.7%, keeping pace with inflation as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The city accomplished this while still maintaining vital investments in areas like the Waterfront TIF. These projects are designed to add new property value in the coming years, which helps share the cost of city services across a broader tax base and protects current residents from shouldering the full impact of rising costs alone.

What Does the New Tax Rate Mean for My Property Assessment?

The tax rate is what you pay per $1,000 of your property’s value. Property values are determined by “comps,” or what comparable properties are selling for in Dover. However, an increase in your property’s assessed value doesn’t always mean an equal increase in your tax bill.

• When total property values in Dover go up (the “tax base” grows), the tax rate can often go down to compensate.
• When values stay flat, the tax rate must rise to meet the city’s budget needs, simply because inflation means the cost of providing the same services increases every year.

In Dover, the City Assessor’s office performs annual updates (with the exception of last year due to a software migration) to ensure your assessment stays in line with the actual market. I know there are many who don’t really like this, but it intends to prevent sticker shock for a property owner whose taxable value might grow significantly over a longer period, like five years. It’s sort of relative in terms of what you pay for taxes.

This is how your property taxes are calculated:

(Assessed Value / $1,000)​ × Tax Rate = Tax Bill

Imagine your home is assessed at $500,000 and the tax rate is set at $20:

($500,000 / $1,000​) × $20 = $10,000 Tax Bill

Now, imagine the same city had a much smaller tax base; that it hadn’t updated its assessments in decades. The city still needs to raise the same amount of money. In this scenario, your home might only be valued at $250,000, but the tax rate would have to jump to $40:

($250,000​ / $1,000) × $40 = $10,000 Tax Bill

Are Out-of-State Buyers Driving Dover Residents Out?

It’s a common concern that an influx of buyers from Massachusetts is pricing locals out. According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, migration from Massachusetts was a primary driver of growth in 2025. However, historical context shows our growth is actually slowing.

Jessica Williams, writing for New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, “New Hampshire Continued to Rely on Migration from Massachusetts for Population Growth in 2025”:

During the 1970s and 1980s, the state gained an average of more than 18,000 new residents each year. While data from the early 2020s show an uptick in population growth relative to the 2010s, New Hampshire has since added about 7,000 people each year, less than half of the annual gains during the 1970s and 1980s.

Property values are rising nationwide. While the high cost of housing is a concern, migration is necessary. Since 2017, New Hampshire deaths have outpaced births. New residents are the only thing keeping our local workforce and economy from shrinking.

The solution is to add housing supply. High prices aren’t caused by too many people as much as they are caused by too few homes. The only way to stabilize housing costs and protect the tax base is to add supply. When we build more, we spread the tax burden across more properties.

How Do Policy Decisions Made in Concord Impact Our Property Tax Bills in Dover?

While local officials set the Dover budget, a significant portion of what you pay is dictated by the State House. When the state reduces its share of funding for things like education and retirement systems, those cost don’t disappear, they just get pushed down to the local level.

People like to think of New Hampshire as the “Live Free or Die” state; that New Hampshire doesn’t believe in taxes. That’s just not true. The state costs money to run. Municipalities cost money to run. When the state cuts taxes for people who aren’t you, it raises taxes for people who are you. It’s not that New Hampshire doesn’t believe in taxes; it believes that property owners should pay for everything.

Your city and your City Council, myself included, should be pressured to spend responsibly. However, when less money comes in from the state, Dover can only raise money through property taxes. It’s a painful reality. I’m thankful that residents pay attention to local spending. In the strongest possible terms, I encourage you to give attention in equal measure to the State House.

Why Did Dover Spend All That Money on Athletic Fields?

The decision to fund the athletic fields was made before my time on the City Council. I don’t say that as an “it’s not my fault” statement. I could easily say I would have voted the other way, but that would be conveniently self-serving. Instead, I’m going to skip my personal opinion entirely.

The condition of Dover’s athletic fields was poor. Whether the city chose to install grass or turf, the project was going to cost millions of dollars. This was the result of years of maintenance debt — the accumulated cost of deferring necessary repairs and upgrades over a long period. The city reached a point where patching things up was no longer an option.

Turf was recommended because it allowed for higher utilization. While the upfront cost is higher than grass, the cost-per-hour of use is lower: longer seasons and more frequent use, fewer closures due to rain or mud, and rental income to help offset the investment costs.

Ultimately, you have turf fields because your neighbors demanded them. I watched the meetings leading up to that vote. There was lots of public engagement — much more than this year’s municipal and school budgets — and reasonable people disagreed.

In the end, the Council was split just like the community. They eventually voted to approve a compromise: a larger project budget (though not the total amount originally requested) that would support the installation of turf for the majority of the project. If you think about it, no one really got what they wanted.

Is School Spending out of Control?

You might not like my answer to this one: Your School Board is a capable fiduciary of your tax dollars, and your schools have competent leadership.

The reality is that schools are simply expensive. New England schools are among the most costly in the country, and New Hampshire ranks dead-last in the nation for state-level funding of public education. That isn’t a metaphor; it’s a structural reality. I’ve already written about this in detail if you want to learn more.

Our buildings and roads are expensive because our winters destroy them. Teacher salaries are expensive because the job market is competitive, and educators need to be able to afford housing within a commutable distance to Dover.

The proposed FY2027 budget was $877,000 over the tax cap. Of that amount, $577,000 alone was tied to increases in transportation costs for special education. We have a legal and moral duty to care for children with special education needs, a mandate codified in law that makes this spending non-optional.

There is also an economic phenomenon called the Baumol Effect. As other segments of the economy (like manufacturing and knowledge work) experience lower cost structures from automation, the relative costs of services like teaching and healthcare rise in proportion. Education requires a human being to deliver time within a reasonable student-to-teacher ratio; there is no machine that can double a teacher’s output without adding more staff.

A useful way to examine Dover’s efficiency is to look at the average annual cost per pupil. Out of 162 reporting school districts in New Hampshire, Dover ranked 152nd in cost-per-pupil spending. This means only 10 districts in the entire state spend less per student than we do. We are capturing the advantages of scale and maintaining a highly efficient budget. To anticipate the follow-up question: No, this does not mean we are short-changing our children. Dover closely monitors the quality of education we deliver, and our results remain strong despite our lean spending. Again, our scale helps.

I Got a Rock

Remember when I said that Dover residents need to pay attention to what occurs in the State House as much as we pay attention to what happens in Dover? On March 26, 2026, the Governor signed HB1815-FN, which limits the state’s obligation to pay for public education.

HB1815 redefines what qualifies as an “adequate education” under state law, narrowing the scope of what the state is required to fund. It also declares that education funding decisions are a political matter — not a judicial one — effectively pushing back against decades of NH Supreme Court rulings that held the state accountable for adequately funding public schools. The state can spend less while claiming it’s meeting its obligations, and the gap between what schools actually cost and what Concord covers gets pushed to local property taxpayers.

Earlier in the year, the state also lowered the Business Enterprise Tax, reducing a revenue source that helped fund state services. Proponents argue these changes promote economic growth and reduce the tax burden on businesses. But when the state cuts one tax, it doesn’t cut the need for the services that tax funded. It just changes how the services are funded: your property tax bill. If decades of these tax cuts were benefiting you, you’d feel better off today than you did ten years ago. From what I hear from residents, most of you don’t.

In the classic Halloween special, everyone else gets a candy bar. Dover property owners just got a rock.

Should Dover Cut Pay for Employees?

No. The public sector already pays less than the private sector, and we are seeing the consequences of that gap in real-time. Also, I’m fairly confident we’d violate some contracts.

Our Community Services department — the people who pave and plow our roads, ensure we have clean water, empty our trash cans, and repair literal sewage breaks — is already having trouble hiring. If we cut pay, we aren’t just saving money; we are losing the ability to provide basic, essential services. I don’t believe there is any room to move backward here.

Race for the bottom, and you’ll find it. In my professional career, I’ve found that a few competent people create more value than many incompetent people, and an incompetent leader can bankrupt a city. To be clear, Dover is not bankrupt. Our financials are strong, and they’re audited annually by an independent third party to ensure transparency.

When we talk about cutting employee salaries, we’re talking about cutting the salaries of our neighbors. Many employees of the City of Dover live right here in town.

I’ll ask folks to put themselves in their shoes. How would you feel if your employer’s customers were unhappy with something your company did and demanded your salary get cut? Most of us would find that unreasonable in our own careers. Our city employees deserve the same professional respect and the ability to afford to live in the community they serve.

We cannot expect high-quality public safety, clean water, and plowed roads if we offer 1990s wages in a 2026 economy.

Why Isn’t the Budget under the Tax Cap by More than It Is?

Short answer: that would mean cutting services, possibly services that you need and use. The reality is, not all municipal services benefit everyone equally.

Not everyone uses the schools. Lots of people do. Not everyone uses the library. Lots of people do. Not everyone uses the pool. Lots of people do, and it brings money into our downtown, which makes it possible for businesses to operate there and provide some relief to your tax bill.

Shared services make sense when they provide value through scale. Imagine if water and sewer were the responsibility of individual homeowners. Would you want your access to clean water based on how much you trust your neighbor to maintain their septic? If you live on a side road that doesn’t serve much through traffic, would you want to be responsible for your own road maintenance? On a cost-per-acre basis, that burden would be enormous if you don’t live in a densely populated area.

The same logic applies to police, fire, and emergency medical services. What if there were no such thing as municipal scale, and every household had to contract for their own safety individually?

The tax cap is a function of inflation plus growth. A flat zero percent increase in spending doesn’t mean holding steady. It means cutting services by the rate of inflation while providing no accommodation for added growth.

I receive lots of suggestions to reduce services and cut spending. Believe me, I also want to pay less. Paying less in property taxes is in my direct financial interest.

The challenge is that people generally want to cut different things, based on what they use. But if the city has decided that something is worth having or doing, we have to budget for the people who deliver the service and for its ongoing maintenance. Otherwise, we blow up the idea of predictability, accepting a short-term savings today for a surprise bill tomorrow.

None of this feels good. During this year’s budget, the City Council debated down to the minutiae of weed control. It gets further complicated when reasonable people have different definitions of “good.” For example, we’re dealing with a milfoil infestation at Willand Pond. The city received a quote to remediate it at $50,000. However, because the NH DES-recommended solution required a pesticide, the public advocated for a non-toxic remedy, a choice that was $100,000 more expensive. I’m not arguing that either solution is right or wrong. That’s not the point. Rather, reasonable people weigh the value of features differently: cost versus environmental-friendliness.

If the City Is Responsible with My Money, Then Why Does It Have Debt?

Debt gets a bad rap, but it isn’t inherently bad. Debt enables individuals, organizations, and governments to invest in projects that deliver returns with minimal upfront capital. I have a mortgage, and owning a home is an asset. I couldn’t have paid for it in cash.

The City of Dover invested in the downtown TIF district, and that investment has delivered strong performance. The city assumed debt for the parking garage and is on track to pay it off more than a decade early. This year, revenues from the TIF — generated by stronger property values downtown — provided direct financial relief to your tax bill. The returns from the downtown TIF contributed to the city delivering the FY2027 budget under the tax cap.

If the city took a no-debt approach, taxpayers would have to come up with the money for a given project all at once, whether it’s infrastructure or new development. It would be nearly impossible to invest in projects that deliver long-term benefits to taxpayers. Prioritizing for the long-term is hard, because it sometimes requires acting against our short-term interests. Endure some pain now to avoid extraordinary pain later.

Questions or Ideas?

I want to hear from you. Contact me.