Town of Killington v. State

In this appeal concerning a transition provision of Vermont’s school funding law, we confront a familiar dispute in which one side claims the benefit of the common and ordinary meaning of the statutory language, while the other side relies primarily on the legislative purpose of the statute to give meaning to the term at issue. The provision in question capped for a two-year period the anticipated rapid rise in property taxes in the so-called “gold” towns resulting from the passage of the Equal Educational Property Act of 1997 (hereinafter “Act 60”). The statute saved appellee Town of…