27 June—Among the cornucopia of stupid legislation on the books of Connecticut (and presumably similarly taxpayer-unfriendly states) is a law that the owner of taxable real and/or personal property (including motor vehicles in Connecticut) is required to pay the tax due to whatever municipality even if the property owner hasn’t received a physical tax bill, with unpaid taxes accruing interest from the due date.

The stupid law, which predates the internet, presumes that failure to receive a physical tax bill is not a valid defense for nonpayment because property owners must know that tax is owed. But, you wonder, how is a property owner to know how much tax is owed? On the other hand, the taxpayer can always get all the information directly from the town tax collector. And thanks to the internet all the information is readily available on municipal websites anyway.

Except it’s not. In Litchfield, anyway, the town and borough. And Bantam. State statute makes municipal taxes or installments therefor due and payable on 1 July and charitably gives taxpayers a month’s grace before usurious 18 percent annual interest accrues. Even though statute implies that paper tax bills aren’t required, it used to be customary and expected for tax collectors to send out bills well before the due date so that even with the U.S. Post Office’s legendary unreliability property owners could make appropriate arrangements with their brokers, bankers, or shylocks.

To get to the point, then (because I have to change the blades on the zero-turn, no mean feat), with just two business days to go till the due date, I haven’t received a tax bill from either the town or the borough. The borough tax collector, who also does Bantam, used to be right on top of it, so the bill used to arrive in plenty of time. But this year? The borough warden says the bills were given to whoever is supposed to mail them a few weeks ago (shortly after the borough budget passed, presumably). And of course the borough website provides no information at all on the current tax due, let alone downloadable PDFs of the tax bills.

The Bantam website is equally uninformative about current taxes, more so about past taxes.

As for the town tax bill, which of late has been arriving later and later, the tax collector’s web page provides information and downloadable PDFs of current motor vehicle tax bills but not current real property tax bills. Why the hell would that be? Calls to the tax collector’s office during business hours yesterday were answered by a recording.

Knowing last year’s taxes and the increase or, in the case of the borough the decrease, in the mill rate, this year’s taxes can always be extrapolated. But should that be necessary? If the tax collectors are doing their jobs? And damn the stupid state law . . .