The Board of Assessor’s recently sent a letter to the Mayor and the City Council acknowledging an error on the FY26 property tax bills due to a miscommunication with the vendor used by Board of Assessors to generate tax bills. Click here to read the letter.
The letter reads as follows:
This communication is intended to update you on a tax billing issue that was recently identified.
On Friday, 01/02/2026, it was discovered that the FY26 tax bills used a CPA assessment rate of 1.5%. This was incorrect; the rate should have been set at 1.0% in accordance with the ballot initiative approved last November and reflected on the third-quarter bill. The issue stemmed from a miscommunication with the vendor used by this office to generate tax bills once the final rate is voted on by the Council.
Upon discovery of the error, this office immediately began working with the Tax Collector and Treasurer to resolve the issue. We have since begun recalculating the affected bills to ensure the correct CPA assessment is applied.
As of the date of this communication [January 5, 2026], most of the corrective work has been completed, and we expect the process to be finalized within the next day. The corrected information will be reflected on the fourth-quarter tax bills, which will be mailed in April.
In the interim, taxpayers may request an updated tax statement and, by the end of this week, will be able to download corrected bills through the UniPay system available on the City’s website: holyoke.org. Any taxpayer who has already made a payment based on the incorrect calculation will see a credit reflected on their updated bill.
We apologize for the confusion caused by this oversight. While understandably frustrating, we anticipate that this error will have minimal impact on the overall collection of taxes.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or require additional information.
Respectfully,
Grant Schlosstein for The Board of Assessors