PORTLAND, Maine — Insurance company Unum and Central Maine Power Co. top Portland’s list of property taxpayers in the most recent rankings tabulated by city officials late last month.
But while those two entities have been the top taxpayers going back decades, their shares of the total city tax intake have crept downward in recent years, a sign that Portland’s tax base is healthy and diversifying, city officials say.
Other changes in the city’s lists of top taxpayers over the years signal bigger shifts in society and the economy.
Among Portland’s top 10 taxpayers in fiscal year 1992 were Guy Gannett Communications, which owned the Portland Press Herald newspaper and other media entities, and New England Telephone & Telegraph Co., as well as Maine Savings Bank and Maine National Bank. Fleet Bank finished just outside the top 10 list at No. 13.
“You had your traditional telecommunications companies and newspapers up in the top 10 every year, but now they’ve fallen out of it,” City Assessor Rick Blackburn said. “The banks themselves, they don’t own much of anything any more. They just lease things now.”
No bank can be found on the list today, but all the way up at No. 4 in the 2014 rankings is Unitil, one of the companies on the forefront of natural gas expansion in the state.
In the most recent list of Portland taxpayers, Unum retained the top spot with property assessed at nearly $157.6 million in value, and will pay almost $3.2 million in taxes. CMP followed with property assessed at $80.2 million, and was charged $1.6 million in taxes.
No. 3 Cow Plaza LLC — which owns a range of mixed-use buildings in the downtown and was behind the recent construction of the new Hyatt Place hotel on the corner of Fore and Union streets — was charged more than $1.4 million in property taxes for property and real estate worth nearly $70.1 million.
Unitil had property assessed at a value of almost $62.4 million and was charged more than $1.2 million in property taxes. The only other taxpayer to receive a bill topping $1 million from the city was J.B Brown & Sons, whose real estate holdings were determined to be worth nearly $58.3 million, triggering annual property taxes of just less than $1.2 million.
Like Cow Plaza, J.B. Brown, a property firm, is responsible for one of the hotels in the city’s ongoing hospitality boom, the Courtyard by Marriott on Commercial Street. Portland is in the process of adding more than 500 hotel rooms over a five-year period.
“There’s a lot of value in hotels now, and there’s a lot of value in a lot of the apartment properties that haven’t been condominiumized,” Blackburn said.
Showing its relatively long history in Portland, J.B. Brown ranked No. 3 on the fiscal year 1992 list.
Blackburn said what’s encouraging about the tax list is that it shows Portland collects tax revenues from a wide variety of sources.
“Bond underwriters want to know that, as a city, you’re not over-reliant on one or two big taxpayers, that your tax base is stable and diverse, and in Portland, it is,” he said.
As a sign, Unum’s share of the city’s overall tax base this year was the smallest it has been in decades. The company accounted for nearly 4 percent of the city’s overall taxable valuation at points over the last 20 years, but is now at just 2.07 percent.
CMP accounted for as much as 1.44 percent of the city’s tax base in 1997, but over the last five years has hovered between 0.93 percent and 1.06 percent.
