Based upon interest and feedback I’ve made some updates to the tax application described here. In short, I developed an application using Shiny that helps residents in my town of Nottingham, NH determine their estimated tax based on the future outcome of election results on warrant articles at town meeting. The updated version is here:
https://jonathancummings.shinyapps.io/NottinghamTaxCalculator/
Layout
The first thing you will notice is different about the tax application is the layout. It is now organized into three tabs. The first tab “Documentation” gives a brief description of the overall application, a call for donations to support my time and web hosting fees, and descriptions of what can be found on the remaining tabs.
Nottingham, NH Tax History
This tab helps communicate two new things that were not in the 1.0 version of the application. 1) The tax rates – and their impacts given your assessed value – for past tax years (2016, 2017, 2018). If your actual tax bills don’t match these values that can help you adjust the values in 2019E in the appropriate manner. 2) The estimated tax rates and tax impact for the upcoming year based on election results. I calculated these rates by adding the rates for each town articles, as well as adding the previous year local school tax rate to the current year rate increases and rates from school articles.
Nottingham, NH TM-Day
This tab is unchanged from the previous version of the application, but is now in a tab of its own. I have not implemented a change to include school taxes in this tab, but I plan to do so prior to elections next year.
Additional Towns or other requests
Want to see tax impacts for your town? You have a few options. One is to look up tax rates for your town and send them to me, or tell me how to find them. I can then do some coding to add a tab to the application for your town. Another is to do the calculations yourself using a mathematical programming tool (Excel, R, Python, etc.), or a piece of paper if you feel like using your high school math skills.
Convert your tax rate to a rate per dollar if it is not provided that way. For example, Nottingham tax rates are per $1000, so divide the rates provided by 1000. Then multiply by your assessed value by the tax rates and you have your estimated tax impact. If there are multiple tax rates by article, by category, or the like add them up to get the total impact.
