Great Barrington special town meeting to address school funding options, affordable housing

Representatives from Stockbridge, West Stockbridge and Great Barrington, along with school committee members, were finally able to hash out something that could ease some of Great Barrington’s financial burden.

Great Barrington — A Special Town Meeting next week will likely ask voters to weigh in on two issues that have been at the top of local debate and discussion over the last few years: how the three towns in the school district are billed for school costs, and affordable housing.

The Selectboard meets this week to finalize the warrant items.

The 6 p.m. January 26 meeting at Monument Mountain Regional High School will cover an amendment proposed to the Berkshire Hills Regional School District Regional Agreement that would change the funding formula for future capital projects, like renovating or building a new high school.

This is the culmination of a year of difficult negotiations on the district’s Regional Agreement Amendment Committee (RAAC). Representatives from Stockbridge, West Stockbridge and Great Barrington, along with school committee members, were finally able to hash out something that could ease some of Great Barrington’s financial burden, since the town sends the most students to the schools, and so pays 70 percent of costs between the three towns.

Great Barrington’s 2016 Annual Town Meeting, where school budget and school funding woes were the issue du jour. A special town meeting on January 26 at 6 p.m. will ask voters to weigh in on school funding issues. Photo: David Scribner
Great Barrington’s 2016 Annual Town Meeting, where school budget and school funding woes were the issue du jour. A special town meeting on January 26 at 6 p.m. will ask voters to weigh in on school funding issues. Photo: David Scribner

It was a burden that made Great Barrington voters twice sink recent proposals to renovate a badly deteriorating Monument High, a 50-year-old school, at a time when the district’s budget continues its annual climb into the stratosphere.

So the amendment won’t change this headcount formula, but will give Great Barrington a break by using a measurement of a town’s wealth to determine how much it should pay for future projects.

In the same vein, voters will also be asked if the town should support a state education finance reform bill that would change this headcount apportionment method to cover the district’s costs. This bill would support using an assessed property value method, also known as a unified tax rate.

Basically this would have every taxpayer in the school district paying a single rate for school costs.

Great Barrington resident and RAAC member Chip Elitzer at 2016 town meeting. Elitzer is proposing a warrant article that asks for school funding changes at a state level. Photo: David Scribner
Great Barrington resident and RAAC member Chip Elitzer at 2016 town meeting. Elitzer is proposing a warrant article that asks for school funding changes at a state level. Photo: David Scribner

Great Barrington resident and RAAC committee member Chip Elitzer is behind this warrant item. He was outspoken on RAAC, and tried to get the committee to agree to a proposal that would do this without having to go to the state. But it was a tough sell for Stockbridge, which pays about 15 percent of district costs because it doesn’t send as many students to the schools.

Elitzer wrote in a letter to the Selectboard that a unified tax rate within a district is “standard practice in Massachusetts and explicitly mandated in many states like New York and New Jersey.”

“It is good public policy,” he added.

His proposal would also mandate that all towns in the state that are part of a regional school district to avoid “beggar thy neighbor negotiations that cause some small communities to play one district against another in bidding wars.”

Here Elitzer is referring to school tuition, in which students who do not have a school in their town come to the district, the tuition paid by the sending town. This state mandated policy has been controversial in the ongoing local debate, since tuition agreements with the district never add up to enough to cover the entire cost of educating a student at Berkshire Hills. The most recent state data show the tuition rate per student here at around $17,000.

Elitzer’s proposed warrant article is reproduced at the end of this article, but the warrant language may change after a review by the Selectboard and town counsel.

Affordable Housing Trust Fund

Affordable Housing is another hot topic in the Berkshires, and now Great Barrington is asking voters to establish an Affordable Housing Trust Fund overseen by a board of trustees (the warrant item in full can be viewed here.)

The Great Barrington Selectboard will vote to finalize a Special Town Meeting warrant this week. Member Bill Cooke, far right, took the reins of the town’s affordable housing needs, and was instrumental in putting the issue before voters. From left: Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin, Board Chair Sean Stanton, Board Vice Chair Steve Bannon, Dan Bailly, Ed Abrahams and Bill Cooke. Photo: Heather Bellow
The Great Barrington Selectboard will vote to finalize a Special Town Meeting warrant this week. Member Bill Cooke, far right, took the reins of the town’s affordable housing needs, and was instrumental in putting the issue before voters. From left: Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin, Board Chair Sean Stanton, Board Vice Chair Steve Bannon, Dan Bailly, Ed Abrahams and Bill Cooke. Photo: Heather Bellow

A fund of $50,000 from Community Preservation Act funds was approved by the Community Preservation Committee, and that will have to be approved at Annual Town Meeting in May.

Selectboard member Bill Cooke said he made affordable housing his “mission” because “it is probably the most critical thing we need at the moment.”

Cooke said voters had approved establishing a housing trust fund in 2007, “but nothing was done.” This latest warrant article will set up a bylaw so that the board would act as a separate municipal entity.

And Cooke has some thoughts about how the board might tackle the town’s rising real estate costs that leave many people out. He said he was in favor of something different than “a big development” that segregates affordable housing. Since the town has a number of homes sprinkled around that it is taking over back taxes, he and other town officials have discussed transferring those homes to the trust to be fixed up and turned into 2- or 3-family units. He said this would balance out the high price of real estate, partly due to the current pattern of second homeowners increasing home values by buying and renovating houses in town.

“Rather than 45 units in one part of town, we need 2-3 family units all over town,” he added. It’s known as “scattered development,” he said, and it integrates rather than segregates.

“It will be up to the board how that moves forward,” he noted, and he said he wants the board composed of people “who can make this happen.”

And with this approach of transforming these town-owned homes, Cooke said, “we can bite off small pieces. You don’t have to raise millions, or get money from the state.”

*     *     *

From Chip Elitzer’s letter to the Selectboard:

The purpose of the article is to support a Massachusetts Education Finance Reform bill that would fix dysfunctional aspects of current laws and put all of the Commonwealth’s regional school districts on a sounder financial footing, enabling them not only to maintain standards but to offer enriched programs. The features of the bill would be as follows:

(1) Change the statutory method for regional school district apportionment to an assessed property value method (unified tax rate). Currently, all District agreements approved by the Department of Elementary & Secondary Education (DESE) use a student headcount formula for apportionment among member towns, unless the member towns unanimously approve, annually, an alternative method. The proposed mechanism for transitioning to this new statutory method is described below.

This change would be consistent with the state’s long and proud tradition of supporting public education, whose fundamental financing principle — as opposed to that of private education — is that all children are entitled to a free education paid for by all members of their community in proportion to their ability to pay, not on how many children they have, if any. Because the lion’s share of public K-12 education is funded by local property taxes, taxable assessed value is a “perfect” measure of ability to pay. (Although state income taxes rather than local property taxes might be a better method of education finance, there is no realistic prospect of changing that in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the U.S. in the foreseeable future.)

The practical effect of that change in the statutory method of apportionment would be to bring the tax situation of all taxpayers in regional school districts in line with the other 90 percent of the Commonwealth’s taxpayers who already live in school districts where they pay the same rate as all of their other neighbors in the district. (Only seven of the 100 largest public school districts in the state are regional districts, containing more than a single local taxing authority.)

A single rate within a school district is not only the standard practice in Massachusetts (and explicitly mandated in many states like New York and New Jersey); it is good public policy. Any discount to that rate for any taxpayer in a school district is a net loss to that district’s revenue. It is in the Commonwealth’s interest that all school districts fund themselves as efficiently as possible at the local level so that demands on the state budget can be minimized.

(2) Mandate that all towns in the Commonwealth must either have their own school district or belong to a regional school district, by a date several years hence. If implemented, this would eliminate the “beggar thy neighbor” negotiations that cause some smaller communities to play one district against another in bidding wars. The concept of tuition should be anathema to public schools (see public education’s fundamental financing principle cited above).

 *     *     *

The proposed text of the warrant article reads as follows (Editor’s note: The language may change after review by the town.):

To see if the Town Meeting will endorse a Massachusetts Education Finance Reform bill with the following features:

(1) To change the statutory method for regional school district apportionment to an assessed property value method (unified tax rate), according to the mechanism described below.

(2) To mandate that all towns in the Commonwealth must either have their own school district or belong to a regional school district, by a date several years hence.

Proposed Mechanism for Transitioning to a Unified Tax Rate in a Regional School District:

In each fiscal year beginning with the first fiscal year after enactment of the Massachusetts Education Finance Reform law, each town that paid more than the Unified District Tax Rate in the year of enactment shall pay THE GREATER OF (1) what it was assessed in the year of enactment, or (2) the amount calculated by applying the Unified District Tax Rate to the assessed taxable property value in that town as of the first day of December of the prior fiscal year; and each town that paid less than the Unified District Tax Rate in the year of enactment shall pay THE LESSER OF (a) the amount calculated by applying the Unified District Tax Rate to the assessed taxable property value in that town as of the first day of December of the prior fiscal year, or (b) the total assessment to all member towns minus the assessments to those member towns paying more than the Unified District Tax Rate (the “Residual Assessment”); provided however, that if more than one member town is paying less than the Unified District Tax Rate, then those towns shall apportion the Residual Assessment among themselves according to the apportionment formula in use in the year of enactment.

The “Unified District Tax Rate” is defined as (x) the total apportionment to the member towns of the school district, divided by (y) the total assessed taxable value of residential, commercial, industrial, and personal property of the member towns, multiplied by (z) 1,000, as of the first day of December of the prior fiscal year.