LOWER MERION \u2013 Lower Merion officials approved its annual property tax relief program for qualified volunteer firefighters and emergency medical service personnel. <\/p>\n
Adam Szumski, chief financial officer for Lower Merion, outlined the details of the program at the board\u2019s finance committee meeting in December. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an annual resolution since these real estate tax rebates were introduced,\u201d Szumski said. \u201cThis outlines the criteria by which volunteers must meet to receive the refund. Just to recap the impact on our budget. This past year, 47 eligible volunteers received rebates totaling $37,900, or an average refund of $807, so this resolution again merely reaffirms the criteria to receive that rebate. There are no changes to that criteria since last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
The tax rebate program, adopted by Lower Merion Township in 2017, provides real estate tax credits to volunteer members of fire companies located in Lower Merion. This tax credit program is only for Lower Merion Township property taxes. The county and school district property taxes are done separately. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great to see that the rebates processed in 2025 equal the number eligible. So that means all those who are eligible are going through the process and this is an important way that we have recently been enabled to provide real estate tax credits to those who are volunteering as firefighters and medical personnel,\u201d Commissioner Scott Zelov said. <\/p>\n
With 47 volunteers using the program this past year for the 2024 tax year, the program is growing. For the 2023 tax year, 44 individuals were eligible for the program. They were reimbursed $37,753, or an average of approximately $858 per volunteer.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Daniel Bernheim expressed his ongoing support for the program. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a great thing. We were just talking a couple of minutes ago about recruitment and retention. This is one of the few arrows in our quiver, as this board may recall, when the legislation changed, that we could go from 20% to 100%. I think we did it in less than 48 hours,\u201d Bernheim said. <\/p>\n
The tax credit received final approval at the Board of Commissioners\u2019 December meeting. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LOWER MERION \u2013 Lower Merion officials approved its annual property tax relief program for qualified volunteer firefighters and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70883,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[182,183,185,184,186,803,139,28],"class_list":{"0":"post-70882","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lower-merion","8":"tag-local-news","9":"tag-lower-merion","10":"tag-lower-merion-headlines","11":"tag-lower-merion-news","12":"tag-lower-merion-township","13":"tag-luzerne-county","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-pennsylvania"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}