from Boston.com
At a time when rising taxes are a concern statewide, four towns south of Boston will vote next Tuesday on adopting the Community Preservation Act or altering their current program. (Read the full story here.)
from Boston.com
At a time when rising taxes are a concern statewide, four towns south of Boston will vote next Tuesday on adopting the Community Preservation Act or altering their current program. (Read the full story here.)
We need to save our prop 2 1/2 overrides for teachers. We don’t need to raise our taxes to create a slush fund where an unelected board of 5-9 people has the authority to spend our tax dollars on things we don’t need. Really? Is this really good for the town of Milton? Look what happened when a board decided not to allow a development on Eliot St. Now it’s going to cost us hundreds of thousands more. I think it is foolish not to have all of our taxes allocated through town meeting and not let an unelected board decide how to spend our money.
The CPA is not a slush fund. No unelected board has authority to spend anything. The voters will decide whether we need the CPA. And the Planning Board carried out its responsibility under Town Bylaws to uphold town zoning. Town Boards and Committees should never fail to fulfill their responsibility to the town merely because an applicant who didn’t get what he wanted might sue the town.
I trust the voters to make a decision based on the facts, not on false claims that CPA funds are not allocated by Town Meeting.
This is what former Town Manager, John Cronin told the Boston Globe South this past Thursday:
“Proponent John Cronin said the CPA program provides communities with the discretionary income they lost under the state’s Proposition 2½, which generally limits annual increases in property tax revenue to 2.5 percent, unless residents vote to override the law.”
The CPA may not be a “slush fund” by definition but does compromise the effectiveness of Proposition 2 1/2 and is a by-pass around Prop 2 1/2.
The purpose of Proposition 2 1/2 was to control “discretionary spending” The sole purpose of the Community Preservation Act – CPA – is to severely weaken that control.
If the CPA passes and it proceeds to bond preservation items we will find ourselves deeper in debt with no immediate way out.
The CPA is a slush fund. It creates a pool of unappropriated money.
A committee of 5 to 9 people is appointed, not elected.
The committee determines a use for the money and that recommendation is presented to town meeting.The standard for the justification of the expenditure is not the same as a prop 2 1/2 override because the tax has already been imposed and collected.The committee’s sole function is to spend the money.
Maybe when the new town administrator is in place,he or she could create a work culture where department heads could strive to come in under budget for the year rather than being penalized for the next fiscal year’s budget if they leave money ” on the table”.Take those savings and invest it within their departments on capitol expenditures and alike.
Also,the proposal for 131 Eliot St. did meet the zoning requirements under the PUD for the area.The zoning bylaw gives the board almost full discretion for approval. It decided not to approve the development.We did not appeal the decision.The town is going to demolish the portion of the building it owns. It has allocated $198,000 to do so.The town also needs to allocate funds to restore the factory walls after the demolition is complete.When the restoration project for our building is completed by the town, we will further evaluate the property for future use.
Vote NO on question 4.
I understand the pros and cons of this issue but the only concern
I have is can the people of the Town afford a tax on top of the taxes we now pay including our water and sewer which for
most of us are hundreds of dollars each quarter. All I ask is please think long and hard before you vote for this CPA tax and who will be affected by passing this.
To compare the function of Town Meeting and the warrant committee to the CPA tax and the subsequent appointed spending committee for the CPA tax money is not a valid one.It is also nothing like a prop 2 1/2 override.Creating an additional tax burden on the property owners of our town just isn’t a good idea,in my opinion. The proponents of the tax cite the flexibility of the perameters for spending the tax money as an attribute.I do not think determining that it is a slush fund is a silly conclusion.
In fact voting on the CPA is exactly like voting on a Proposition 2 1/2 override. The function of the Warrant Committee and the Town Meeting with respect to the money raised is exactly the same for both. The Community Preservation Committee doesn’t bypass these institutions, it must deal through them for proposed expenditures just as any town department does now. Whether this tax is a good idea or not is for the voters to decide. And they should not decide on the basis of a silly claim of “slush fund”.