Norway Parcel Review — A Citizen’s Guide to Fairer Property Tax Valuations

What this is, and how to use it

Norway Parcel Review takes the 2026 property record cards prepared by the Town’s revaluation contractor, John E. O’Donnell & Associates, and reads every one of them against the Town’s prior tax commitments and the sales that have actually occurred in town. It is written for residents, not assessors: it explains what the numbers on your card mean, where they came from, and what you can do if they are wrong. It is prepared by a Norway property owner from public records. It is not an appraisal, not legal advice, and not a Town publication. Why these records are public, and what this initiative stands for, is set out under Purpose & sources.

To review your parcel, type your street address, your map/lot number (it is on your tax bill), or your name into the box above and choose your account. You will get a review in six parts: the headline numbers (value and tax, 2025 against 2026); where the card stands against its class, its street, the sales in this site’s own ratio analysis, and its purchase history; the card itself, line by line; the closest sales of similar property; every account on your street; and how to act, with deadlines. The Print button makes a copy to keep or to attach to an abatement application, and the address in your browser bar can be sent to a neighbor so they see the same review.

Two things the data cannot see. The price on a card is what the Town recorded on the deed; when several parcels were bought together, the same total appears on each of them, and the review says so and compares the combined assessment instead. And a card cannot tell whether a building was rebuilt after it was bought, so where a purchase looks far below today’s assessment the review also gives the building’s standing against every structure of its type in town — that comparison, not the old price, is the test for a house that has been renovated. If your review gets something wrong, the correction is welcome; the data behind every line is public and can be re-checked.

To understand the whole town, use the tabs above — Town-wide findings, the Condition & obsolescence guide, Relief programs, Sources. In brief: what the revaluation did in total, the staircase (bills rose most where homes were worth least), who carries the increase by class and by lake, what this site’s own sales analysis shows, how the values were made, the budget and where it is heading, and the relief programs that exist now with links to apply. Every figure on this site is computed from the published cards and rolls and can be checked against them.

What the revaluation did

The revaluation more than doubled the town’s taxable value and cut the mil rate nearly in half. A doubled value at a halved rate would leave every bill where it was; what actually moved bills is that values did not double evenly. The figures below are computed from all 3,514 accounts on the 2026 roll against the 2025 commitment. Tax for 2026 is calculated at the proposed rate with each parcel’s 2026 exemptions; the 2025 tax is the amount actually billed.

The less your home was worth, the more your bill went up

Homes only (houses, mobile homes, multi-family), grouped by what they were assessed at on the 2025 roll after exemptions. Bars show the median change in the tax bill; the figure beneath is the share of bills that rose.

Homes are sorted into these bands by their 2025 net taxable value — after that parcel’s own 2025 exemptions. Sorting instead by the pre-exemption land-plus-building total moves 315 of the 2,479 homes here (12.7%) into a different band, since exemption amounts vary by owner. The staircase shape holds either way, but the exact figures shift a little at the low end: the under-$100,000 band’s median bill change is +48.4% sorted the way it is above (by net value) versus +53.7% sorted by gross value. Every other band moves by less than 4 percentage points.

Who carries the increase

The same levy, distributed differently. “Value change” is the median parcel’s assessed value; “tax change” is the class total at 10.96 mils against what the class paid in 2025.

The lakes did not move together

What the sales say

Three dials, no schedule

Every building value on the 2026 roll is a cost table multiplied by three judgments made from the driveway: a grade (2.00 to 10.00), a condition (0–100%), and two obsolescence factors. Land is a numbered table (1–10) with a first-acre price from $30,600 to $300,000, a per-acre curve for the rest, a per-foot price for shore frontage, and a flat “site improvement” charge ($35,000 on 1,980 parcels). At the September 1 hearing the assessors’ agent was unable to produce a written definition of any table, the grade and condition guide, or the obsolescence schedule. That is not a complaint about any one card; it is why no owner can check their own.

• Condition has a floor at 60%. 230 building rows sit at exactly 60% and 72 below it, in a town whose derelict structures are carded at $168,000–$204,000. The eight low-condition sales in the study sold above the town median ratio, all eight.
• Obsolescence was applied to commerce, not homes. 92.5% of building rows carry no markdown at all; the economic factor appears on one residential parcel in the whole town.
• The land schedule was set to house sales, not land sales. Seven bare lake lots sold since 2021 at 50–80% of their 2026 land assessment; large woodland tracts sold at $1,200–$1,800 an acre against $2,200–$3,900 on the roll.
• Older cottages were priced as new houses. On North Pond a 1970s cottage and a 2024 build on the same lot sit within about $100,000 of each other on the roll; the sales put them $350,000–$500,000 apart. The cottage sales were removed from the study as “non-market.”

The budget: what the Town raises, and where it is heading

A revaluation decides shares; the levy — the amount the Town raises by property tax after other revenues — decides the total. Norway’s levy went from $7,478,397 on the 2022 roll to $11,458,048 on the 2025 roll, 15.3% a year, against consumer inflation of about 3.4% a year and growth in taxable parcels of 2.0% a year. The figure given by the assessors’ agent for 2026 is $12,936,375, +12.9% in one year (it was described at the hearing as “about 8%”). At that pace a bill doubles every 4.9 years whatever the roll says.

Where it’s been: sixteen years of tax commitments, 2009–2026

Every point through 2024 is Norway’s own line in Maine Revenue Services’ annual Municipal Valuation Return Statistical Summary — the state’s independent record of what each town actually committed, not this office’s calculation. The dashed segment marks the gap where no state summary was available (2025) and the 2026 figure, which is the proposed commitment pending the Board’s final rate.

Ten years out, four arithmetic paths

Compound arithmetic from the 2026 figure; not a forecast. Per-parcel figures divide the levy by a parcel count growing 2.0% a year.

The bottom two paths are not austerity; they are what a town this size grows at. The gap between them and the top two is the Board’s choice, made one budget at a time, and no revaluation, ratio, or abatement changes it by a dollar. Whatever the Board decides about the roll, it should publish the levy, the levy-neutral rate, and this chart beside any mil rate it proposes.

Vacant and derelict buildings shift the levy onto everyone else

Because the property tax must track market value (Me. Const. Art. IX, §8), a deteriorating building is a valuation discount — a lower assessment, a smaller share of the levy, and the difference made up by every other bill in town. Reading the 2026 cards against the 2025 roll, 72 improved parcels had their building value frozen or written down against a town-wide median building increase of 1.78× (78%); 44 of those 72 were written down in absolute dollars. Bringing those 72 buildings only to the town’s own median factor would add roughly $8.3 million of taxable value — about $91,000 a year at 10.96 mils, paid today by every other taxpayer. The pattern is visible bill by bill: the 72 candidate parcels carry a median tax decrease of 16.2% while the median improved parcel in town rose 10.6%, and three in four of them are going down while their neighbors go up.

A citizen proposal — a vacant & derelict building registration ordinance modeled on Bangor, Maine’s Chapter 223 — would put an escalating fee on buildings left vacant and unsecured, funding code enforcement rather than raising anyone’s assessment, and giving owners of neglected property a real reason to repair, sell, or demolish rather than warehouse. It does not touch the constitution’s market-value rule; it sits beside the tax system as a regulatory fee, the same tool Bangor and a growing number of Maine towns already use.

Who pays what share of the levy, before and after

The town needs to raise the same amount of money either way. The revaluation just changes who pays how much of it. The table below shows what each type of property paid in 2025, what it would pay in 2026 at the new rate of 10.96 mils, and what share of the town’s total tax bill that type of property carries. If a class’s share went up, that class is now paying for more of the town’s budget than it used to. The “added mils” column, at the far right, shows how much extra tax rate that group is really paying on top of the normal rate.

What “added mils” really means. A mil is $1 of tax for every $1,000 a property is worth. The Town says the 2026 tax rate is 10.96 mils for everyone. But that is only true if every property was valued fairly. If a property’s value was pushed up more than it should have been, that property is really paying a higher rate than 10.96 — even though the bill just says 10.96. The “added mils” column shows how much higher. Commercial and institutional buildings pay the most extra: 4.42 mils on top of the normal rate, which adds up to a 67.7% jump in their tax bill. Mobile homes pay the second most extra: 2.74 mils on top, a 33.3% jump. These are the same two classes flagged elsewhere on this site as least supported by actual sales. Single-family and multi-family houses are the only groups paying close to the normal rate, or a little less. This is not just true for whole classes of property — it is true house by house, too. A home that was overvalued is paying a higher real tax rate than a home that was undervalued, even though both are on the exact same tax roll.

Shares are of the taxable accounts on both rolls (exempt parcels, and accounts new to the 2026 roll, are excluded from the totals). Added mils = (class tax at 10.96 on the 2026 roll − class tax as billed in 2025) ÷ class 2026 taxable value × 1,000.

The class sheets

One page per class: condition bands, functional and economic obsolescence counts, land and structure change, and the effective added mils. Prepared from the 2026 cards. Norway’s card system does not carry a separate industrial class — industrial buildings are carded under the same “commercial & institutional” type as offices, retail and institutional property, so that sheet covers all three. Each chart below links to the full source document.

Single-family homes

Multi-family

Mobile and manufactured homes

Commercial & industrial

Condition, functional obsolescence and economic obsolescence — what they mean, and how to argue them

Every building value on the 2026 roll is one multiplication: base cost (the firm’s table for the building type and size) × grade (quality of construction, 2.00–10.00) × condition (0–100%) × functional obsolescence (0–100%) × economic obsolescence (0–100%). The base cost and grade set what the building would cost to build; the other three are depreciation — everything that makes it worth less than that. The professional standard (IAAO, Standard on Mass Appraisal of Real Property) requires depreciation to be extracted from sales and documented so that any owner can reproduce it. In Norway none of the three schedules has been produced, and every factor was assigned from the outside of the building. This page tells you what each dial is supposed to mean, how Norway used it, and what evidence moves it.

1. Condition (“percent good”)

Condition is physical depreciation: wear, age and deferred maintenance, expressed as the share of the building’s cost that survives. The industry ladders it in named steps. The percentages below are the firm’s scale; the descriptions are the appraisal profession’s (IAAO Glossary; Fannie Mae/UAD condition ratings C1–C6; Marshall & Swift).

Of 11,552 building rows on the 2026 roll, 302 are at 60% or below and 8,817 are at 80% or above. The 60% line functions as a floor: it is the rating on 16 King Street (no running water or heat, under contract at $60,000 as a tear-down, assessed $168,221) and 14 King Street (no kitchen, bath, water, sewer or power, assessed $204,090).

How to argue condition. Condition is the easiest factor to move, because it is the one the assessor admits was assigned from the driveway. Ask for the grade-and-condition guide the lister used (1 M.R.S. §408-A); if none exists, say so in the application. Document what the exterior visit could not see — interior photographs, dated, with a short list of what is original, what is failing, and what it would cost to cure. Compare your rating with the same-type, same-age houses on your review (the “building against its type” line gives your percentile). State the rating you are asking for in the industry’s words: “the house is C4/fair — original 1970 roof, windows and boiler, sills soft on the north side — and should be rated 65%, not 90%.” The arithmetic is on the card: building value × (asked ÷ carded).

2. Functional obsolescence

Functional obsolescence is loss of value from something inside the property that the market penalizes but that condition does not capture: an outdated or awkward design, a superadequacy (a building larger or costlier than the site can use), an inadequacy (one bath for four bedrooms, no bath on the bedroom floor, seven-foot ceilings, a kitchen reachable only through a bedroom), a layout that cannot be cured without reconstruction, a barn or outbuilding that no longer has a use. The IAAO Glossary defines it as loss in value due to lack of utility or desirability inherent to the improvement itself. It is applied as a percentage of the building value and it is supposed to come from paired sales — what buyers actually pay less for.

How to argue functional obsolescence. Name the defect specifically and say why it cannot be cured cheaply: “one bathroom for a four-bedroom house, on the first floor; adding a second bath means plumbing through a slab”; “a 3,000 sq ft barn on a 1-acre lot with no agricultural use”; “a duplex whose units share a single electrical service.” Then point to the market: a sale of a similar house without the defect (your review lists the closest sales in the study) sold for X; yours, or one like it, for Y. Ask for the factor as a percentage of the building and cite the firm’s own uses of it — 70% on the Crockett Ridge barn, 80% on 14 King Street — as the scale it evidently recognizes. If the Town says it has no functional schedule, the answer is that the IAAO standard requires one and that an unexplained 100% is not a finding, it is an omission.

3. Economic (external) obsolescence

Economic obsolescence is loss of value from something outside the property that the owner cannot fix: a commercial or industrial neighbor, a highway, a derelict structure next door, the loss of services, a market that no longer wants the property type. The IAAO Glossary describes it as loss in value caused by factors external to the property. It is the factor for a house between a motel and a drug store on Route 26, for a camp beside an abandoned warehouse, for a park home whose only market is other park residents.

A test for when it belongs on the building at all. A peer-reviewed 2021 study in The Appraisal Journal (Longhofer, “Land Values and External Obsolescence”) works out something the definition above does not: an external condition almost always depresses the land’s value first, so marking down the building for the same condition on top of a market-based land value risks counting the loss twice. Its result: the building carries external obsolescence if and only if the parcel’s current use is no longer its highest and best use — the wrong kind of building for the site, or the right kind at the wrong size. If the house is still the best use of the lot despite the nuisance next door, the entire loss belongs on the land line, and a 100% building factor is correct — but only if the land was actually marked down to match. If the surrounding conditions have pushed the lot’s best use to something else — commercial, denser residential, or simply a use the market no longer wants at all — then a building factor is not optional, and carrying the building at 100% leaves the loss uncounted anywhere on the card.

How to argue economic obsolescence. Describe the external condition and its permanence: what is next door, across the street, on the road; the noise, traffic, blight or lack of services; that you cannot cure it. Then apply the test above: ask the Town whether it considers your parcel’s current use its highest and best use. If yes, ask to see the land line marked down for the same condition, since the loss has to appear somewhere on the card; if the Town cannot show that, the card is not applying its own theory consistently. If no — if the surrounding conditions have made your house something other than the site’s best use — the building factor is not just arguable, it is required by the same framework the profession uses. Show that the firm recognizes the condition — it applied the factor to the commercial parcel beside you, or to the King Street warehouse — and ask for consistency: the same condition should carry a factor on every parcel it affects. Where there is a sale, use it: a house in the corridor sold for less per square foot than the same house on a residential street. Ask for a percentage of the building value; 10–20% is the range the firm itself used on commercial rows.

4. Putting it on paper

An abatement application (36 M.R.S. §841) is a short form and an attachment. The attachment should have four parts, in this order: the card as it is (copy it from your review); the specific factor you challenge and the rating you ask for, in the industry’s words; the evidence (photographs, estimates, a sale, the neighbor’s card); and the arithmetic — building value × the asked factor ÷ the carded factor, and the tax at 10.96 mils. Attach a request under 36 M.R.S. §711 and 1 M.R.S. §408-A for the grade and condition guide, the functional and economic obsolescence schedules, and the field notes from your visit. If the Town cannot produce them, put that sentence in the application: an assessment whose basis the assessor cannot state is the definition of “manifestly wrong.” File within 185 days of commitment; keep a dated copy.

Definitions summarized from the IAAO Glossary for Property Assessment and Appraisal and the IAAO Standard on Mass Appraisal of Real Property; condition ladder aligned to the Uniform Appraisal Dataset C1–C6 ratings. Norway counts from the 2026 cards.

Exemptions, deferrals and abatements — and where to apply

All applications go through the Norway Town Office (assessing) unless noted; State forms are on the Maine Revenue Services property-tax pages. Deadlines are April 1 for exemptions and current-use programs, 185 days from commitment for abatements. Links open State or Town pages; if one has moved, start at maine.gov/revenue/taxes/property-tax.

The Homestead Exemption is not always worth $25,000

The table above lists the Homestead Exemption at its full $25,000, because that is what it is worth on the 2026 roll. But $25,000 (36 M.R.S. §684) is the exemption’s value only in a town assessed at 100% of market value. Maine Revenue Services scales it down, one dollar for every one percentage point, by the town’s own certified ratio: a town assessed at 80% of market value only gets to subtract 80% of $25,000 — $20,000 — because the exemption has to track the same yardstick as the assessment it is subtracted from.

Norway’s own certified ratio ran 100% every year from 2009 through 2022 (see the Town-wide findings tab), then slipped to 85% in 2023 and 80% in 2024 as assessments fell behind a rising market. The 2026 revaluation resets that ratio to 100%, which is why every Homestead Exemption on the new cards reads exactly $25,000, with no exceptions across the 1,225 homesteaded accounts on the roll. That is a real restoration of about $5,000 in exemption value — a 25% increase from the $20,000 a homesteaded owner was actually receiving in 2024. It is not, however, a 25% improvement in what the exemption protects. Among the 889 homesteaded single-family homes on the roll, the median 2025 assessed value (land and building, before any exemption) was $201,571; the same homes’ median 2026 value is $372,601, up 85%. The exemption covered about 9.9% of a typical homesteaded home’s value in 2025; fully restored, it covers about 6.7% of that same home’s much larger 2026 value. The dollar exemption went up by a quarter; the value it is measured against went up by five-sixths. That gap — not any change in the exemption itself — is why a homesteaded owner can receive the full $25,000 for the first time in years and still see a substantially larger bill.

Town of Norway: Town Office, 19 Danforth Street, Norway, ME 04268 · (207) 743-6651 · norwaymaine.com. Verify current forms, limits and deadlines with the Town Office or Maine Revenue Services; program terms are summarized from statute and change from year to year.

Properties that pay no tax

Maine exempts certain owners — government, religious, charitable, educational and similar institutions — from property tax under 36 M.R.S. §652. The town still carries these parcels on the roll and assesses a value for them; that value is then exempted in full, so no tax is billed. This is a full list of the parcels whose 2026 assessed value is entirely exempted: Search by owner, street or parcel below. This is a public-record list, not a judgment that any exemption is wrongly granted — the §652 categories are broad and most of these are routine (the Town itself, the water district, churches, fire and rescue, land trusts, group homes).

Public records, openly read

Norway Parcel Review is built entirely from records that Maine law makes public, and it exists for one reason: so that the people who pay the town’s taxes can see how their share was decided, check it against the same evidence the assessors had, and act on what they find. Honesty and transparency in taxation and in the conduct of local government are not a courtesy the Town extends; they are the law’s starting point.

What the statute says

• The policy of the State. Maine’s Freedom of Access Act opens with a declaration of public policy: public proceedings are to be conducted openly, and the records and actions of public bodies are to be open to public inspection, with the Act to be liberally construed and applied to promote that policy. 1 M.R.S. §401
• Assessing records are public records. A public record is any written or electronic matter received or prepared for use in connection with the transaction of public business, unless a specific statute makes it confidential. The property record cards, the valuation and commitment books, the tax maps, and the sales files prepared for a revaluation are prepared for the Town’s business of assessing and collecting taxes; they are public records. 1 M.R.S. §402(3)
• Every person may inspect them. Any person has the right to inspect and copy any public record during reasonable office hours. The right does not depend on owning the parcel, living in the town, or giving a reason; a request need not be in writing; a denial must be in writing, within five working days, stating the statutory basis, and may be appealed to the Superior Court. 1 M.R.S. §408-A, §409
• Who “the assessors” actually are. Under Maine law the assessors of a municipality that has not created a separate assessing board are its municipal officers — in Norway, the Select Board. John E. O’Donnell & Associates is a hired contractor, retained to carry out the valuation work as the assessors’ agent; it is not itself “the assessors,” and being a hired firm does not give it the assessors’ legal authority. Abatement applications are decided by the Select Board, not by the contractor, and the assessment record required below must remain in the Select Board’s possession at the municipal office — not with O’Donnell & Associates. 36 M.R.S. §703
• The assessment record must stay at the assessors’ office and be available to owners. The assessors are required to make a record of their assessment and of the invoice and valuation, to deposit that record or a copy of it in the assessors’ office before the taxes are committed, there to remain, and to make the entire assessing record for a taxable property available to its owner in a timely manner. In a town whose selectmen serve as assessors, the assessors’ office is the town office. 36 M.R.S. §711; §703
• The commitment is a public act. The assessors commit the completed tax list to the collector under their hands with a warrant; the list of every parcel, its valuation and its tax is the commitment book, a public record on deposit with the Town. 36 M.R.S. §709
• Equal assessment is a constitutional right. All taxes upon real estate are to be assessed equally according to the just value thereof. A resident cannot know whether that promise was kept without seeing the record of how it was applied to the neighbors. Maine Constitution, Art. IX, §8
• What is not public, and is not here. The statute keeps confidential a taxpayer’s own declarations and income-and-expense filings made to the assessor, hardship-abatement applications, and personal identifiers. None of those appear on this site. Everything on it comes from the cards, the rolls and the sales files the Town itself publishes or holds as public records. 36 M.R.S. §706-A; §841(2)

What this initiative stands for

That a tax bill should be explainable to the person who pays it. That the tables, schedules and judgments behind an assessment are part of the public record of how it was made, and that an assessment whose basis cannot be stated should not be committed. That the same evidence the assessors used — the cards, the prior rolls, the sales — should be in residents’ hands before the deadlines that govern their rights run out, not after. That the levy, the levy-neutral rate and the distribution of the burden by class should be published beside any mil rate the Town proposes. And that reading public records openly, and saying plainly what they show, is not an attack on the Town; it is what the Freedom of Access Act says the Town’s business is supposed to look like.

Statutes summarized from the Maine Revised Statutes as published by the Legislature (legislature.maine.gov/statutes). Consult the current text before relying on any provision.

How to act, in order

• Before the list is committed, the assessors can correct any value informally on request. Ask in writing; keep the copy.
• After commitment, file a written abatement application with the assessors within 185 days (36 M.R.S. §841). If they do not answer in 60 days it is deemed denied; appeal to the Board of Assessment Review or County Commissioners within 60 days of denial; a further appeal goes to Superior Court within 30 days.
• Your record. Under 36 M.R.S. §711 the Town must make the entire assessing record for your parcel available to you; under 1 M.R.S. §408-A anyone may inspect any card. Ask for the 2025 and 2026 cards together, and for the table definitions, grade and condition guide, and obsolescence schedule that produced your numbers.
• Evidence that moves a number: your own purchase price; a sale of a similar property (the study’s sales are listed on each review); photographs of the actual condition, inside and out; a bill of sale for a mobile home; a management plan for woodland.
• Exemptions and programs: see Relief that exists now above for each program, who qualifies, what it is worth, and the link to apply.

Where these figures come from

This site is produced from an analysis of the 2026 property record cards prepared by John E. O’Donnell & Associates for the Town of Norway’s revaluation, as published before commitment, and the Town of Norway’s municipal tax commitments from previous years (the 2022 and 2025 committed rolls, with each parcel’s land, building, exemption and tax as billed), contrasted against the available sales data from the Maine Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and sale prices and dates recorded on the Town’s 2021–2026 property record cards. The time adjustment, the screen for a usable arm’s-length sale, and the outlier trim applied to build a ratio sample from those sales are this site’s own analysis, not a Town-produced study — see “This site’s own test” under Town-wide findings for the exact method.

• 2026 assessments, land lines, building rows, grades, conditions, obsolescence factors, site charges, exemptions and visit codes — the 2026 property record cards, jeodonnell.com/cama/norway, as captured in September 2026.
• 2025 and 2022 values and taxes — the Town of Norway’s committed tax rolls for those years; 2025 tax is the amount actually billed at 20.38 mils.
• 2026 tax — computed at the proposed 10.96 mils with the exemptions shown on each 2026 card. If the Board sets a different rate the dollar figures scale accordingly.
• Sales, time adjustments and ratios — sale prices and dates recorded on the Town’s 2023–2026 and 2021–2022 property record cards; the time adjustment (3.37%/yr, fitted from this same data), the arm’s-length screen (single-parcel, $25,000 or more, sold 2023 or later) and the outlier trim (a 1.5×IQR band, 0.339–2.124, around the sales’ own ratio spread) are this site’s own analysis, not the Town’s; Maine MLS records for listing history and market medians where cited on individual reviews.
• Levy, mil rate and 2026 budget figures — the 2022 and 2025 commitments and the figures stated by the assessors’ agent at the September 1, 2026 hearing.
• Law and standards — Title 36 and Title 1 of the Maine Revised Statutes as cited; the IAAO Standard on Mass Appraisal of Real Property and IAAO Glossary; Maine Revenue Services bulletins and program pages linked above.

Prepared by a Norway property owner and published at norwayparcelreview.org. Assessment data are public records; every figure on this site can be checked against the published cards and rolls. Nothing here is an appraisal, a legal opinion, or advice from the Town or its assessors.

Budget trend line graph

Sixteen years of Norway’s town-wide property tax levy — the total amount raised by property taxes each year, before any single parcel’s share is decided — stitched from the state’s own certified record and the Town’s own figures for the two years the state has not yet published. The line is solid where a figure is certified (2009–2024) and dashed where it is the Town’s actual 2025 commitment or its proposed, not-yet-committed 2026 budget.

Source: Maine Revenue Services, Municipal Valuation Return Statistical Summary Reports (2009–2024); Town of Norway actual committed levy (2025) and proposed budget (2026). MRS’s certified 2022 figure ($7.59M) runs about 1.5% above the $7.48M figure used elsewhere on this site for that year — two source records for the same year. See The budget: what the Town raises, and where it is heading above for the levy math behind the 2026 figure and a year-by-year table.

Winners and losers of the 2026 reval

Set against the 2025 roll at the proposed 10.96 mils, 1,002 of the 3,365 taxable accounts with a billed 2025 tax of $250 or more end up paying less in 2026 and 2,363 end up paying more. The two totals are not close: for every dollar of relief the revaluation handed out, it asked for almost four dollars more from someone else.

The single biggest winner and the single biggest loser, in dollars

Ranked by percentage change, the extremes are small accounts where a tiny dollar swing produces a huge percentage. Ranked by the dollars actually at stake, two accounts stand apart from everyone else on the roll — one utility corridor and one mobile home park, moving in opposite directions by six figures.

CMP’s transmission and distribution corridor account carries no single owner-occupant to object to a $71,013 reduction; Town & Country’s park — one account behind several hundred mobile home lots — absorbs a $94,333 increase with no single homeowner positioned to challenge it either, since the individual lot rents, not this parcel’s card, are what residents actually see. Both figures are the parcel’s own 2025 billed tax against its 2026 tax at the proposed 10.96 mils with 2026 exemptions; neither account’s change is explained elsewhere on this site by a documented sale, so both are here simply because no other single account on the 3,514-parcel roll moved anywhere close to as many dollars in either direction.

What the tax bill actually did on the water

Waterfront land carries the steepest value increases of any land type in town — land alone on the 494 shorefront parcels identified on this site rose 152.7% from the 2025 roll to the 2026 cards, and these parcels’ total assessed value rose 125.0%. It is tempting to read that straight into the tax bill, but the mil rate falling from 20.38 to 10.96 absorbs most of a value increase before it reaches anyone’s bill, waterfront included. The chart below is the fairer comparison: what these parcels actually pay in 2026 against what they paid in 2025, set beside the same value-increase measure used for other property classes on this site.

Across the 494 shorefront parcels with a valid 2025 tax bill, taxes rose 21.4% in aggregate ($3,243,395 to $3,937,618, a total increase of $694,223) and 16.4% for the typical shorefront parcel — both above the townwide median tax change of +11.9%, but far short of the 125% value figure. 419 of the 494 shorefront parcels (84.8%) pay more in 2026; 75 pay less.

Waterfront parcels are those carrying a “Primary Lot” land row billed by linear water frontage on the property card (503 identified; 494 have a valid 2025 billed tax to compare against). Tax figures compare each parcel’s 2025 billed tax to its 2026 tax at the proposed 10.96 mils with 2026 exemptions. The property-class chart alongside it uses the same value-change measure (2025 land-plus-building value versus 2026 total value) detailed further in Tax by property class.

Why this exists, and how to help

Matthew Glatz is dedicating his own savings to create this aggregate data project of municipal tax records and expenses, collections and assessments from all available state and municipal public documents. If you’d like to support his LLM subscription used for data collection and calculation, or help him replace his tired, old socks before winter, send him a Venmo, or drop an apple crisp on his doorstep with a kind note.

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