Reilly airs two television ads attacking his rivals on taxes

Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly's campaign is taking the offensive today with two new television ads that criticize his two Democratic gubernatorial opponents on taxes -- their opposition to an immediate rollback of the state income tax rate and their refusal to release their income tax returns.

His rivals, Deval L. Patrick and Christopher Gabrieli, both said Reilly's aggressiveness is a sign that he needs to make up ground before the primary two weeks away.

``You can sum it up in one word -- desperate," Gabrieli spokesman Dan Cence said.

``It must mean we're doing something right," said Patrick.

Both campaigns have repeatedly characterized Reilly's support for the rollback as an about-face because until late last year he said the state could not afford a quick cut from 5.3 percent to 5 percent, as approved by voters in 2000 but frozen by the Legislature two years later. Reilly said he changed his position after the state began generating revenue surpluses.

Reilly's campaign declined to release an advance text of the spots last night, but a spokesman, David Guarino , said they were ``issue-based ads, comparative ads . . . on significant differences between the candidates." He said Patrick doesn't like to talk about taxes ``because he's the guy who's going to raise them."

Patrick has resisted the idea of rolling back the income tax, and said yesterday the state has been playing ``a shell game" on taxes that has caused cities and towns to raise property taxes and fees to maintain local services.

Gabrieli is already airing a tax ad characterizing Reilly's rollback proposal as an election-year promise and Patrick's balking at a cut as an example of the reason why voters have elected Republican governors since 1990. Gabrieli has outlined a proposal that would gradually reduce the tax rate to 5 percent over several years by applying a portion of increases in state tax revenues to rate relief.

Reilly is the only candidate to release his income tax returns, which show his income to be only his salary as attorney general, his wife's teacher's pension, and a small amount of interest from a bank savings account. Both his Democratic opponents have refused to release their returns, saying the information is private. Patrick, a former corporate executive, did, however, reveal total income of $3.8 million last year and identified the specific amounts from various sources.

Recently filed campaign finance reports show that in the last 16 days of August, Gabrieli spent $1.95 million, by far the most of any candidate in a similar period this year. He also kicked in another $500,000 of his own money to his campaign account, raising his total for the year to almost $8 million, by far the record for self-funded campaigns in Massachusetts.

The Republican nominee, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, contributed $2.2 million more of her family's money to her campaign, bringing to $4.2 million the amount of personal funds donated so far.

Also yesterday, Patrick unveiled a plan to encourage Massachusetts cities and towns to abolish school fees by offering additional state aid.

Patrick outlined his plan outside McCall Middle School in Winchester. He said it would allocate an additional $34 million to communities that purge or continue to avoid charging fees for public school programs and services such as bus transportation, sports, and extracurricular activities.

Russell Nichols of the Globe staff contributed to this report.