PHILLIPS – After more than an hour of discussion, voters agreed to increase the state property tax levy limit of $146,860, under protest, during Saturday’s annual town meeting. The vote was 47-11.
Charlie Wilbur, who describes himself as the oldest one-time-selectman still living, railed against state promises to help towns with state-mandated budget cuts and tax increases, after making a motion to accept the article under protest.
The article “actually ties the hands of your municipal officers,” he said, “and they are not to blame for the increase in our property tax. They always came out with a bare bones budget.”
“But there are other things that comes into it,” Wilbur went on. “There’s only just one word that causes taxes to be so high – the one word is consolidation.”
He described a time when property valuation in Phillips was determined by town officers, raised when necessary and lowered when not. But that all changed when Phillips and other Franklin County municipalities voted to consolidate their school districts into SAD 58 at the state’s request. State officials “promised every district in the state they would help with the consolidation costs, and pay 55 percent of the total cost of upgrading the schools.” They lived up to the promise in part, but did not immediately pay the 55 percent, Wilbur said, which “sucked every town into debt.”
“The state has never lived up to anything they have ever promised anyway, and now they want to cut personal property tax. It won’t hurt this town as much as it would hurt Rumford, or Jay. Jay derives a lot of tax dollars out of the prop tax. State says they will pay 50 percent, but you know as well as I know that that won’t last too long,” Wilbur continued.
If soon towns will not be able to raise taxes through personal property to cover their expenses, and will have to abide by the property tax levy limit, how will they operate? Wilbur asked. “The municipalities is broke, and the state is broke,” he said.
Representative Tom Saviello also spoke to the issue, saying that the tax levy limit was “primarily put in for (towns in) southern Maine,” that often use extra money to start new, expensive programs, and not for the towns in Franklin County that regularly subsist on bare bones budgets. As for the financial issues Wilbur discussed, Saviello said “all of that’s going to start filtering back into (Phillips) over time.”
A discussion about repealing the Dog Ordinance also took up almost an hour of the nearly four-hour meeting. Almost 10 of the about 80 people attending spoke in favor, or against, repealing the ordinance. Selectmen suggested repealing it, because most of the ordinance is redundant, since the state has the same laws. But the town ordinance puts regulations around barking and noise issues, which the state does not, and a few residents worried if the ordinance was repealed they would have no recourse if a nearby dog barked all day long. After 30 minutes of discussion, townspeople voted overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the ordinance as is.
All big-ticket budget articles passed, but a number of smaller dollar value requests from town and local groups were turned down, including requests to appropriate $1,500 for the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, $100 to pay for attendance at the New England Town and City Clerks Conference, and $100 for local group combat. According to Selectman Eric Kinney, the total budget for 2006 is up about 11 percent from nearly $322,700 to nearly $364,500.
Kinney was re-elected to a three-year term, Evelyn Wilbur was elected as town clerk, and Jane Thorndike was elected to a three-year term on the school board.
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