Last year around this time I got COVID which I did not appreciate. This year is a bit more under control and as the Virgo Month of Leisure comes around I am looking forward to a few weeks of board meetings. I’ve talked about this a little bit before but not much. In short, being an elected Justice of the Peace, a position I’ve held since 2013, contains a number of smaller positions. You can be a notary if you want (I am a notary), you can perform weddings if you want (I’ve done 31) and you serve on both the Board of Civil Authority (elections, you can see my photos from the primary here) and the Board of Abatement (tax/water bill appeals). There are a few meetings, it’s mostly good.

Over time people cycle on and off of this group and I’ve found myself one of the more senior members of it so I am the chair. I have mixed feelings about this. I am a little too spacey to run meetings well, but I have a good deal with my vice-chair that she will run the meetings and I will run the Zoom part of them. Randolph recently completed a town-wide reappraisal and nearly everyone’s property values shot up. This caused a certain degree of alarm. Because of the way taxes work (the town’s total budget divided by the total value of all the properties winds up being how much tax you pay) an increase in everyone’s property values doesn’t necessarily mean you pay a lot more taxes but you might pay some. It hasn’t been a great few years in terms of everyone’s income vs. their expenses, so many people are appealing the appraisal of their properties. We as a board hear these appeals. There are a lot of laws that tightly govern how we do these and it’s a lot to keep track of. We have six appeals, these each require a hearing, a property inspection, a second hearing and our little board of volunteers has to try to determine a new fair value of the property, or determine that the value the appraisers determined was already fair. One of the people appealing is our community hospital with their multi-million dollar appraisal. They brought a lawyer who was… feisty.

All of this is to say, I’ve got a lot of admin and paperwork to be doing in the next several weeks and at least a few contentious hearings and all of it is on a fairly tight timeline. I want to do a good job. I want to sneak in some leisure. I want to get outside and welcome the incoming Autumn season which is by far my favorite. And I’m mostly writing this down here as an accountability step. I know the Virgo Month of Leisure starts today. I know that, like always, I have a bit too many things scheduled in a bit too little time. And I know that I can get a bit too, as my friend Jenna calls it “Atlas-like” thinking it’s all on my shoulders. It’s not. We all help. It’s a nice crowd. I think we’ll do okay.