Great Barrington — A proposal to include on an upcoming special town meeting a ballot item requesting the state Legislature enact a measure that would unify the school tax rate paid by the three towns in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District was shot down 4-1 at Wednesday’s (May 18) Selectboard meeting.
The proposed warrant article was nixed as the board scheduled a special town meeting to appropriate the town’s $14.5 million share of the school budget. The town’s portion had been voted down at the May 9 Annual Town Meeting. In the event of failed school budget votes, a special town meeting is required by Massachusetts General Law to officially send money to the schools.
The Special Town Meeting is set for Monday June 13 at 6 p.m. at Monument Mountain Regional High School.
The district’s $25 million budget sailed, without trouble, through the town meetings of the other two towns in the district, Stockbridge and West Stockbridge.
The proposed warrant article was drafted by Chip Elitzer, a member of the RAAC (Regional Agreement Amendment Committee), a group born out of growing discontent among some Great Barrington residents who say the town is unfairly saddled with too big a slice of the 3-town money pie whose division is based upon enrollment rates. Great Barrington pays 52 percent of the total school budget, a 70 percent load among the three towns.
This uneven split was cited as the primary reason Great Barrington voters, two years in a row, sunk plans to renovate the deteriorating 50-year-old Monument Mountain Regional High School. That, combined with annually escalating school budgets due to rising insurance costs and reduced state aid, has hit Great Barrington with a $14.29 per thousand tax rate that is considered high for the incomes of most of the town’s residents.
The issue has stirred some residents into action. Great Barrington’s allocation is a top agenda item for the Green Tea Party, a Great Barrington-based activist group focusing on economic issues. It was GTP, along with Elitzer, that made the case to town meeting voters to vote down the budget with idea of pressuring Stockbridge and West Stockbridge through RAAC to find a way to have all three towns paying the same tax rate, thus spreading out school costs.
But those negotiations, while still in the early stages, hit some rocks when a Stockbridge representative on RAAC made a motion to keep everything the same, setting off town wide controversy that saw Internet crossfire, and then exploded with the vote at town meeting.
But at the next RAAC meeting the day following the Great Barrington town meeting, only a few smoking embers remained. Tempers had cooled. People were listening. At Wednesday’s (May 18) board meeting, Elitzer attributed this to Great Barrington’s no vote on the budget.
“I would like to think that there was a certain sobering effect,” he said, adding that West Stockbridge is on same side of financial fence as Great Barrington, in what Elitzer says is essentially two towns “subsidizing” a third.
But before townspeople lined up at the mic, ready with pitchforks, Town Manager Jennifer Tabakin explained that about half of the town’s $14.5 million share is the “minimum local contribution” required by the state; the other half is the local issue and “defined by the Regional Agreement” between the three towns.
Elitzer went first, trotting out his stats. “Seventy percent of districts in the Commonwealth already have a unified rate,” he said. “The unified rate is, in fact, the rule. Ninety percent of all taxpayers in Massachusetts are paying the same rate as their neighbor does in their same district.”
The style of this sort of analysis, however, has provoked skepticism in some circles. In a recent comment on Elitzer’s recent letter to the editor on the issue, Finance Committee Chair Michael Wise wrote that “What we should look at are the regional districts that comprise several political jurisdictions.”
With a unified rate, Elitzer claims, Great Barrington’s rate this year would be $11.84 per thousand instead of $14.29.
Berkshire Hills Superintendent Peter Dillon wanted to know about Elitzer’s figures. “Ninety percent of what?” he said, noting that it was important to let the RAAC continue its work. “This isn’t going to happen right away or quickly.”
Dillon further noted that there was “no support at the legislative level from our representatives or senators…without that support this can’t move forward at all.”
Indeed, Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli (D-Lenox) has said again and again that this is a local issue that he is “happy to help” with, but only locally. “There’s no legislative remedy to force this on other towns,” he told the Edge. “There’s no way to do it for just one school district.”
Sen. Benjamin Downing (D-Pittsfield) could not be reached for comment on Friday.
Regardless, residents who see local maneuvers as a dead end have fixed their gaze on Boston.
“Maybe they won’t take it on because no one has spoken enough,” said Marsha Weiner.
“Everyone needs to hold our representatives’ feet to the fire,” said Jeffrey House. “I feel there are too may giveaways in Great Barrington so the scale is now tipped so we’re just not taking in the money to solve our problem, and Stockbridge is on that same seesaw and they’re not gonna give a lot. They have reduced revenue, too.”
Vivian Orlowski, who said she comes from a family of educators and was one herself, thinks Elitzer’s warrant item should be considered as a lesson “to young people” about empowering voters. “Chip…he’s a citizen and he’s worked hard on this,” she added.
Board chair Sean Stanton thought Elitzer’s “compelling” warrant item should be given a fair shake, saying both the RAAC process and a shot at legislative changes could “potentially go side by side.” He said there was message in it: “We’re not kidding around about this. We care about education…we’re not interested minor tweaks [to the agreement]…we’re going to start saying no [to the school budget]…and it’s going to become even more messy.”
Board vice chair and Berkshire Hills School Committee Chair Steve Bannon said he wasn’t “against Chip’s proposal, just the timing at this point…the RAAC result may not be satisfactory, but I want to see that process play out. We may come back 6 months from now and accept this.”
He further said Elitzer’s warrant item “seems doomed to fail for a variety of reasons,” mainly that “legislative leaders said they would not endorse it.”
Even board member and RAAC representative Dan Bailly, who voted against the school budget over the tax impact, said he thought RAAC should play out, thought “it is struggling at best.” He said the last meeting “was very encouraging.”
Elitzer got up again, and said he did think RAAC was a “useful form” up to a point. “I fail to see how there’s a successful endgame only through RAAC.”
He said he wanted to the board to “back this play because that’s what town meeting wanted,” and it is a way to keep the “pressure” on.
It appears any “pressure” will work only locally, however, since state systems and their trailing bureaucracies are engineered for the common whole. Tabakin spoke to this, saying while she liked the ideas people have brought to the table, the RAAC process was “democratic,” and “an important listening process,” where “we aren’t just responding to one good idea.”
“I don’t think having a quick answer at this point is strategically advisable because we’re not exactly sure where it would take us,” Tabakin added.
