In June, Mechanic Falls Town Manager Dana Lee was a leader in the successful effort to pass a ballot initiative requiring the state to fund 55 percent of the cost of public education.

When Lee appeared in television commercials and before the editorial board of the Sun Journal, he lamented the difficult task of foreclosing on someone’s home because that person had not paid taxes. The funding proposal would ease the strain by requiring the state to pay more of the cost for education, allowing towns and cities to lower mill rates, he said.

In one commercial, Lee said, “I just firmly believe that you do not fund education by taking people’s homes.” We questioned at the time whether that was happening.

Now, the proponents of the horrible 1 percent property tax cap are using the same line: People shouldn’t be taxed out of their homes.

It’s compelling. It’s also overheated and mostly untrue.

People aren’t being taxed out of their homes. Asked to provide an example of people who have lost their homes because they couldn’t pay their taxes, Tax Cap YES!, Tax Cap Now and the Maine Taxpayer Action Network, all of which support the cap, couldn’t name a single name in Androscoggin, Franklin or Oxford counties. Instead, they point to nameless, faceless examples of people forced to sell and move on.

And now, Lee – who opposes the tax cap and is working for its defeat – has modified his story about people being taxed out of their homes. No one in Mechanic Falls has been put out of a house by foreclosure, he says.

“My point is not the actual number of foreclosures, but the number of people who come down to the wire and have to pull a rabbit out of a hat,” Lee told the Sun Journal.

Back in June, Lee told the Sun Journal that it’s a “miserable day” when he’s forced to foreclose on someone’s house.

Is a foreclosure a foreclosure if the person doesn’t lose the house?

“The tears are real. … One could argue that real, true foreclosures are rare,” Lee said Tuesday. “But people are forced into very difficult choices. They see the train coming and jump off the track. They sell their homes, their land or other things to pay the tax bill.”

Town governments aren’t heartless beasts that gobble up taxpayers, kicking them out on the street. In the vast majority of cases, they work diligently to help people stay in their homes.

Maybe the difference between image and reality can be parsed away. Maybe the claims of foreclosures are mere overstatement, and a few people have lost their homes – anonymously. But the truth and the sloganeering appear at odds.

To us, it looks more and more like rhetoric to further the conventional wisdom that many people are getting kicked out of their homes because of property taxes.

The proposed tax cap is terrible legislation. It would kill local government, undermine education and likely lead to a massive realignment of how government is financed.

We believe property taxes are too high, especially in service-center cities and in some coastal communities. We also think the truth matters.