Would a Homestead Exemption Be Good for Charlestown?

The Town Council’s April 14, 2025, meeting was full of financial topics that ranged from selling a police vehicle to eliminating developer impact fees. One financial change proposed by Councilor Carney at the end of the meeting was to request legislation from the General Assembly to allow Charlestown to enact a Homestead Exemption.

Over the years, there have been proposals to enact a Homestead Exemption. These would have exempted a percentage of the assessed value of real property from taxation for certain taxpayers. One group of taxpayers would have received the exemption, but because the town would have needed to collect a given amount of revenue to provide services and support capital improvements, another group of taxpayers would have needed to pay the difference. None of these proposals has received support from the community in the past.

At its meeting on April 14, the Town Council did not discuss the goal it wanted to achieve—other than wanting to help those year-round residents who needed help, which everyone wants to do. And it did not consider how such an exemption would be structured and whether the exemption as structured was the best way to achieve the desired goal.

Instead, the Council decided as a first step to ask the legislature for authority to draft an ordinance to enact a homestead exemption ordinance.

Councilor Carney and the town’s Tax Assessor have identified other towns and cities in Rhode Island that currently offer Homestead Exemptions. The legislation requested would be modeled on legislation just passed regarding South Kingstown, legislation that takes effect on December 31, 2025.

Thus, the request is to be able to fix, annually, the amount of an exemption from local taxation on taxable real property used for “residential purposes or mixed purposes” and to have the legislation take effect on December 31, 2025.

Councilors Marr and Slom thought it was something worth examining. Councilor Stokes stated that, although he did not know how he would come down on the issue of enacting a homestead exemption ordinance, taking the opportunity to get authority from the state “to have room to operate” was something the Council should do.

There seems to be a rush on the part of the Council to get this authority, and, although it is late in this year’s legislative session, the Council was advised that there is a way the legislation could be introduced. The motion to send a letter to our legislative delegation was adopted unanimously.