City officials say Carol Palesky’s proposal would devastate services.
A proposed 1 percent property tax cap isn’t realistic say city officials here.
“It would mean we’d have to user-fee everything,” said Lewiston City Administer Jim Bennett. Rates would advise people how much they’d “pay for police, for fire protection.”
“It would certainly dismantle the schools,” said Lewiston schools Superintendent Leon Levesque.
Mark Adams, Auburn’s assistant city manager, agreed.
“It would virtually wipe out the programs of cities and schools,” he said.
He worked up some numbers.
After making loan and county tax payments, Adams says Auburn would be left with $1 million to function under the proposal. That’s $1 million to cover everything, all city services as well as education.
Auburn budgeted $58 million to pay for those services and schools this year.
The tax cap is proposed by Carol Palesky’s Maine Tax Action Network. Besides limiting property taxes to $10 per $1,000 of assessed value, Palesky’s plan would roll back the value of property to 1996-97 assessments and limit property value increases to 2 percent annually as long as the land and buildings remain in the same family.
Maine voters will decide in November if they like her plan.
Municipal officials paint a bleak picture if they do.
User fees
Libraries – if open at all – would become like video shops: People would rent books rather than borrow them. Birth certificates would be literally worth their weight in gold. Permits to build a home would soar in cost. Getting a seal on a gasoline pump verifying its accuracy could fuel price inflation.
School offerings, by necessity, would be limited to the proverbial Three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Sports and music, if offered at all, would be strictly pay-to-play.
Still, officials suspect some voters will be tempted by the lure of cheaper property taxes.
If enough are, they’ll “crash us, crash the system” of municipal government, Bennett predicted.
Levesque acknowledged that he knows no more about Palesky’s proposal than what he’s read in the newspaper. Yet he says it worries him. If it’s approved, he said he suspects the state would be forced to step in to pick up the costs for education, virtually all of them.
Adams said much the same, adding that if the state pays for education, it will likely dictate what’s taught and what isn’t.
“Local control would be gone,” said Adams.
Moreover, he said, people will still have to pay for education, as well as the necessary municipal services: plowing, maintaining birth and death records, health inspections and the like.
“No matter what, the cost of government will still come out of our pockets,” said Adams.
Instead of paying high property tax rates, people could expect to see the state sales tax double to pay for education, with some cities and towns imposing added local sales taxes to the mix. The Legislature also might allow municipalities to tax income as well, as is done in some other states.
Bennett said that about the only benefit he could see from Palesky’s effort is that it might spur the Legislature and governor to propose real and significant tax reform as an alternative.
Meanwhile, Palesky’s proposal could also dampen a source of both income and taxes, Adams said. It will likely bring economic development in the state’s cities and towns to a standstill while businesses try to analyze their tax costs if they locate in Maine.
Businesses, Adams added, disdain such uncertainties.
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