LEWISTON – Add tax revenues from non-profits, shifted county government costs and a city income tax to Lewiston’s list of possible property tax fixes.
Councilors floated several ideas designed to cut property taxes at a special workshop meeting Tuesday night.
Now City Administrator Jim Bennett will write those ideas into a memo, present it to councilors in August and begin shopping it around to municipal governments around the state. He hopes the memo will become an action plan ready for state legislators to put into play.
Councilors decided to scrap their property revaluation in May, promising to come up with ideas to reform taxes and get the burden off residential property owners. They hope to bring Lewiston’s legislative delegates and Gov. John Baldacci, as well as opposing candidates for their seats, to Lewiston for a fall tax reform debate.
Councilors met in June to talk about ideas. They left that meeting with no consensus.
They didn’t reach consensus Tuesday either, but they did come up with ideas:
• Non-profits: Three councilors, Stavros Mendros, Mark Paradis and Normand Rousseau said they all favored finding some way to get non-profits to pay a greater share of the city budget.
“They use the city streets and services just like anyone else,” Mendros said. “There should be a way to get them to pay their share.”
• Reduce state spending: Four councilors agreed the best way to help Maine’s municipalities was to reduce state costs. For Mendros and Paradis, that meant getting the state to operate more efficiently. For Rousseau and Councilor Renee Bernier, it meant reducing state-mandated spending for cities and towns.
• New taxes: Three councilors favor replacing part of Maine’s property taxes with some other tax. Paradis said he favored creating a summer sales tax or a regional sales tax. Rousseau said he favored having the state increase it’s sales tax by 1 percent and using that money to buy down property taxes.
Mendros said he was against sales taxes, but favored letting cities like Lewiston have an income tax.
In addition, Mendros suggested getting the state to fund county government.
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