Town may trim surcharge amount

After soundly defeating a proposal last week to raise property taxes, Ashland voters this week will consider a measure to cut them.

A proposed $2.26 million Proposition 2 override failed by a 1,656 to 678 vote in the annual town election Tuesday, roughly 70 to 30 percent.

At Town Meeting, which begins Wednesday, residents will consider a measure that would significantly curtail the town's participation in the Community Preservation Act program, which allows communities to combine a local property tax surcharge with funds from the state to promote open space, historic preservation, and community development.

Voters will be asked to cut the property tax surcharge to 0.5 percent from the current 3 percent.

The money goes into a town account that is eligible for dollar-for-dollar matching funds from the state. Those funds are raised through fees on almost all land transactions at the Registry of Deeds, including refinancing of mortgages.

That amounts to double taxation, argued Selectman John Ellsworth, who also noted that the surcharge effectively raises the town's tax levy without requiring votes on overrides of Proposition 2. He supports the proposed decrease to 0.5 percent, the minimum allowed by state law.

''CPA is a Proposition 2 override. They gussy it up in all this fancy language," Ellsworth said in an interview. ''But it really is a Proposition 2 override without the controls attached."Selectmen opted to bring the measure to Town Meeting in part to help offset the effects of the override.

If approved by voters at Town Meeting, the cut could go on the ballot in the November election. If it passed, town officials estimate it would decrease the property tax on a home assessed at $350,000 by about $87.50, or 25 cents per $1,000 assessed.

Put another way, the town would take in only about $80,000 a year, as opposed to roughly $480,000 currently, said interim town manager Dale Morris.

That's short-sighted, said Steven H. Greenberg, chairman of the town committee charged with bringing projects under the Community Preservation Act program to Town Meeting for approval.

He noted that the current Town Hall renovation project is expected to receive at least $820,000 in Community Preservation Act funds, money that saves the town from having to make interest payments on a loan. Similarly, he said, the town will likely be able to use Community Preservation Act funds for the renovation and addition of the library, which began in April.

A lower property tax surcharge, Greenberg argues, would simply mean that the state would be contributing less money for town projects like these that have to be done anyway.

Greenberg also argues that the funds make other important projects possible, including below-market-rate housing developments that could help the town reach the state's affordable housing goals for communities and might help town employees to live in Ashland.

''If we don't get the CPA money, we don't get the state money," Greenberg said. ''If we don't get both, we can't help."

Ashland's Finance Committee voted unanimously to oppose the cut in the property tax surcharge, largely because committee members want to see the town ''get the most bang for the buck that we can" from state matching funds for public projects, said Selectman Adam Shuster, who served as Finance Committee chairman until he was sworn in as a new selectman after the annual town election last week.

''At this point, it wasn't a philosophical agreement or disagreement with the CPA," Shuster said in an interview.

The Finance Committee is recommending that the town conduct a study to determine how the town can maximize matching funds for necessary projects, with an eye to perhaps reconsidering a decrease in the surcharge at fall Town Meeting, Shuster said.

So far, 65 cities and towns have adopted the Community Preservation Act, according to the website of the Community Preservation Coalition, which supports the act.

Meanwhile, town and school officials say they should be able to get along all right in the wake of the defeat of the $2.26 million operating budget override last week.

School officials were still finalizing the budget for the next school year late last week, but Claudia Bennett, who chairs the committee, said Thursday she expected no teaching positions would be eliminated and no major cuts would be made.

In an interview, Bennett said the override figure was based on inadequate information provided to school officials by former town manager Hector Rivera, who she said did not keep them up-to-date on relatively good news such as the lower-than-expected cost of health insurance.

"We're not 100 percent where we would like to be, but we certainly are in a far better position than where we were told we would be the day after an override failed," Bennett said.

In fact, had she known of the true budget situation, Bennett said, she might not have supported the proposed operating budget override.

"If I had known that this was where we were going to end up dollarwise, I think I would have said let's wait another year, so that we can feel some of the economic recovery and we can have a better sense of the entire town picture," Bennett said.