A way to reduce taxes by $1 Million
- Jean Nam
- Apr 26
- 2 min read
In 2022, the Finance Committee and Select Board worked diligently to develop Financial Policies. One major point of discussion during these conversations was the desire to be efficient and respectful of tax payer dollars. In particular, there was much discussion about CPA funds, and one result of these discussions was that we should try to use CPA funds whenever a project was eligible. This hadn't been happening, so we specifically called it out in the financial policies.
We can reduce our tax bills without sacrificing services, by using CPA funds to pay off Sewataro, Broadacre, and Johnson Farm debts. These land purchases were eligible for CPA funds, but unfortunately, the town decided not to us CPA at the time. We can fix that now. These debts are about $1 Million a year for the next 5 years and then start decreasing. That's $1 Million less per year that the town would need to collect from the taxpayers!
Next year, during the budget process, warrant articles can be written to pay for Broadacre, Sewataro, and Johnson Farm out of CPA funds. Write to your Select Board and Town Manager if you would like this to happen.
The chart below shows that we have enough CPA revenue to do this. The blue bar is the revenue from the annual CPA tax surcharge. The red line indicates our current debt services (payments for Libby, Nobscot, etc.). And the pink line indicates what our CPA debt payments would be if we added Broadacre, Sewataro, and Johnson Farm. The payments fit easily within our CPA revenue.
In fact, the chart below shows that we can still afford this even if we were to reduce the CPA surcharge from 3% to 1.5%.
Consider writing to your Select Board and Town Manager if you are interested in reducing your tax bill by using CPA funds for these land purchase debt payments.
And remember to come to Town Meeting this year (May 5-7) to vote for the citizen's petition to reduce taxes by reducing the CPA surcharge from 3% to 1.5%.
I know that it's difficult to sit through all of town meeting, so if you would like an email reminder during Town Meeting of when to show up to vote for this, please click below and subscribe to my mailing list. Remember, these decisions are made at Town Meeting where we typically have 100-150 people (fewer by the end of the meeting) deciding. Please add yourself to this mailing list so that you can cast your vote for this tax cut.
