Following brief discussion at a Legislative Council meeting May 17, Chair Mary Ann Jacob said her panel voted unanimously to set the 2017-18 mill rate at 33.87 on the 2016 grand list for fiscal year 2017-18, except for motor vehicles.

A mill equals one dollar in taxation for every $1,000 in taxable property.

As a result of state-level action under discussion in the legislature, however, specific details about how Connecticut towns and cities can set their motor vehicle tax rates is still in flux. As a result, the Newtown council approved setting that taxation rate at either the matching rate for real estate - 33.87 - or at the state mandated mill rate cap, which will be determined at the time of printing of local tax bills.

Newtown Finance Director Robert Tait previously said that setting a mill rate cap statewide would not be specifically harmful or costly to local taxpayers, because the cap also came with a corresponding grant to help the town equalize what would be lost between any state mandated cap and a higher mill rate set locally based on the outcome of local budget referendums.

But he said the current mill rate cap up for discussion in Hartford is higher than the proposed local mill rate, and Newtown taxpayers would only have to cover the difference if the local proposed mill rate was higher than any state cap lawmakers eventually agreed upon, got passed, and signed by the governor.

That is because Governor Dannel Malloy's most recent budget proposal zeros out any equalizing grant previously proposed for Newtown and a number of other state communities.

Local officials and their counterparts across the state are still waiting for the outcome of state budget deliberations, and are under some degree of uncertainty because of significant reductions or eliminations of grants to municipalities in the governor's biennial budget proposal. Mr Tait said that a number of his contacts who are involved at the state level indicated that any mill rate cap on vehicles would not fall below the mill rate set by the council May 17.