I
must confess, I put out some misinformation in my last post. Try as I may
occasionally some things slip by me. I intimated that this was a slush fund that
could be spent without approval at the town meeting. My bad, I was wrong; any expenditure
must still pass at an ATM. Now that
changes everything!! I guess can't call it a slush fund anymore. I'll have
to start calling it a LOCK BOX, or a
TRUST FUND. I wonder if it’s like the social security trust fund. I know,
let's call it a war chest to fund all the committee projects that fall under
the ever encroaching shadow of the CPA.
You may call it what you like, but I call it just
another tax scheme and let me tell you why. Under the guise of “community
preservation” the state decided to tack a fee to every piece of property being
sold. In the beginning of the program all of the fees were attached to sale of
the property including the 3% surcharge. However, with a lot of push back from
realtors the rules were changed. These fees were to be collected and redistributed
to communities for the purpose of preservation, and they are. However, getting
the money back to your community is not as easy as it sounds.
Here's how the scheme works. The state collects a
fee from the sale of every property sold in the state; and believe me they have
collected a lot of money. This money is then set aside to redistribute back to
communities for the purpose of “community preservation”. So the state takes
your money and gives it back to you; well sort of. Strict rules make it so you
can only spend it on certain things and then only if you first agree to CPA terms and conditions. The first condition is that you bypass proposition 2-1/2, the law that was designed to protect property owners from being overtaxed. Isn't it amazing that as soon as a law like Prop 2-1/2 is passed the politicians
create new and better ways to get around it.
Anyhow, these monies are given only to
communities who join the CPA. Communities wanting to join have to override
proposition 2-1/2 and pass a property tax surcharge of one to three percent
above and beyond the 2-1/2% maximum allowed by law. In other words if
communities want to get their money back they have to pay another tax. Note
that towns overtaxing their people at the 3% level will receive more of the
funds than towns overtaxing citizens by only 1%. Basically the state has set up
a system whereby they take your money with the promise of giving it back to you
with up to 100% increase. I don’t know about you but this sounds like another
government sponsored Ponzi scheme. Why not just leave the money in the hands of
the people and let them preserve their own communities as they see fit. After all,
Egremont has a long history of supporting their town projects. Just last year
we paid $24,000.00 to start the process of preserving the schoolhouse and the
library. All without the state taking our money and stingily doling it back to
us.
Okay, now let’s look at what happens to the money
if we do actually pass the MCPA. Let's say we want to receive as much of the
state matching funds as we can, which means we would have to go all in. Mary
Brazie said it would raise about 90k per year at 3%. They will have taken all
this money from their friends and neighbors in hopes of doubling it with
matching state funds. Ok, let's say that we do qualify for 100% matching funds
and we collect 180k per year. Now how do we spend the money?
That’s the interesting part. We would have to set
up a committee to review all of the applications for funding. Its board would
consist of members from all of the committees that will be competing for the
funds. This committee would decide which applications go onto the warrant for
the people to vote on. Now I’m not saying that this committee wouldn’t be fair
in determining who goes on the warrant; but talk about conflict of interest and
appearance of impropriety.
Charlie Flynn wants to start low at 1%. Not
because he doesn't want to take full advantage of all that state money. Rather
he knows that the town would never approve a 3% tax hike; but he does think the
town might approve a 1% CPA surcharge. I hope for our sake he’s wrong.
I believe adopting this act would be a disaster
for our town despite the glowing review of the Friends of Egremont History (FOEH).
FOEH stated that we should “join those towns who now are reporting good
benefits from the act”. What FOEH didn't mention in their rosy review is the
towns that were almost devastated by this act. Nor did they mention the fact
that it is more often the wealthy towns that take the lions share of the monies;
at the expense of the poorer towns. It’s the reverse Robin Hood syndrome where
the state robs the poor and gives it to the rich. This was found in a HarvardStudy of the CPA. Follow this link to read the study for yourself.