Question – Will Approving the Town Hall Renovation Project raise my taxes by 30% as some public officials have claimed?
Answer – HECK NO. The annual debt service for the projected $3.97million will be divided into two portions. $1million will be done as debt paid from the Community Preservation Fund and $2.97million is projected to come from excluded debt which is funded through taxes. Of this $2.97million the principal and interest payments for a 20 year borrowing are approximately $250,000 a year which for an annual budget is about 1.25% of our roughly $20million budget.
In fact the table prepared by the Capital Planning and Investment Committee which appeared on page 20 of our town meeting warrant book for ATM 2012 that was published this week was designed in such a way as to mislead the public. It is arranged to lead us to believe that the list of scheduled projects (if approved) would raise our tax bills by 30.1% in 8 years and build a sense of fear around the Town Hall renovation project that will be voted on this week. It’s unlikely that anyone would have noticed and interpreted the fine print at the bottom of the chart: (***The accumulated increase for an average residential tax bill from FY2012 to FY2020 is 26.94%) to mean that they would need to subtract that number from the 30.1% to understand the true fiscal impact of the projects listed if they were approved – This is a difference of 3.16%, of which only 1.25% can be attributed to the debt service for town hall.
Kudos to reporter John Osborn of the Harvard Press in his article of April 20th who debunked public statements by members of the Capital Planning Committee, Bill Johnson and candidate Rhonda Sprague (in their efforts to spread terror among taxpayers) that the capital projects including town hall project will jack up our tax bills 30%. For that horror show to be a reality, the forecasted list of capital projects would have to soar from $14.1million to $134.3 million. Now that’s a number that would be worth being scared of.
