I realize that Tom McBride's letter to the December 3rd Amherst Bulletin suggesting that people who can't pay their real estate taxes sell and move to Hadley wasn't intended to be as harsh as it seems at first reading. After all, the author takes care to say he knows several people who have done that, and he makes it clear that the property tax is regressive and calls for a more fair system. None the less, I reacted very negatively.
Amherst could not afford its excellent schools if there weren't a lot of tax payers who get no personal direct benefit from them.
In this fiscal year, the Amherst schools estimate that the average cost for educating one pupil for one year is $6,356 (see the schools' section of the Amherst government website). The Assessor estimates that the average tax bill will be between $4,600 and $4,700 per year (the tax rate hasn't been set yet, so he wouldn't give me an actual figure). Not all school expenses come out of local taxes; I divided the $29 million plus of local tax support by the $47 million plus of total budget, and found that 62 percent of school costs are funded by local taxes. That equals almost $3,941. For the "average" property owner, each year the taxes on their house pay for one child in the schools, and contribute about $700 for the library, police, fire, roads, recreation, open space, zoning and planning, services for senior citizens or immigrants, public health, snow plowing, fiscal management, etc. etc. Luckily, solid waste, water and sewer are all paid for by users, not out of taxes.
If a family living in the average house has two children who go to school in Amherst for 12 years each, much of that time overlapping, one could say there is a "deficit" of about $3,200 for each of those years; the parents would have to continue to live there and pay taxes on that property for, say, 7 years, before the taxes even covered the costs for the schools, let alone any other services provided by the town as a whole.
Clearly, Amherst depends on those of us who never had children in the schools, or whose kids graduated years ago, to pay its bills. If lots of people did the cost-benefit analysis and decide to bail out as soon as their children have graduated, it would destroy the town and its schools. Even if all remaining parents believed the education was worth ever-increasing property taxes, and could afford to continue paying more and more, the state law does not allow the tax rate to exceed 2.5 percent of value. Currently, we aren't close to that limit: this year the tax rate is probably going to be $16.62 per thousand dollars, or 1.662 percent. But if the taxes had to pay for educating a lot more children because people without children sold to parents and moved out, the rate could go up very fast.
We may already be caught in an upward spiral it's hard to get out of. The Finance Committee has warned us that we have a large problem with the cost of health coverage for employees looming in the near future. All the questions raised by Bryan Harvey in his letter about Amherst's financial future are real issues, and we don't seem to be answering them. I see no reason to believe that the Commonwealth is going to become significantly wealthier or more generous. Actual state programs were cut even more than local aid during the recession, and haven't recovered (note yet another letter, about the state's failure to honor labor contracts with higher education employees).
So we're more dependent on our own resources than we would like to be. In that context, tax payers who pay more than they receive in direct services should be thanked, not dismissed as whiners. And, if a family is "land rich" and has owned farmland or forest lands in town for generations, and have managed to keep those lands open, the last thing we want to do is force them to sell to developers of more houses.
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On another, related subject: I want to add my congratulations and "thank you" to Pete Westover, who has now formally retired from being our town Conservation Director. Even though I have every confidence that Dave Ziomek, our new Conservation Director, will be excellent, it's hard to imagine not having Pete in the office, on the tractor, meeting with people, and crafting the Amherst we know. He, for Amherst, recently received an award from the state for excellent "smart growth" programs. Pete deserves every award he gets, and Amherst has done a good job. But I know Pete shares at least some of my cynical reaction to that particular award, since most of the state programs he used to accomplish the goal are no longer available. I hope and expect that, one way or another, he will still be fighting for those causes in this region for a long time to come.