To the editor:
Egremont voters go to the polls on May 13 to vote on the Community Preservation Act (CPA). The Egremont Municipal Housing Trust recently posted on the town website some frequently asked questions about the proposed adoption of the CPA. They left off some important ones:
A. Can CPA money be spent on things other than affordable housing, historic preservation, and open space and recreation? No.
B. Can I opt out of my taxes being used for one or two of the categories? No.
C. Is there a CPA that creates a fund to be spent on useful things like ambulance service and fire protection? No, the CPA was adopted to please the wishes of a particular class of voters, not those who need basic government services.
D. I worry about taxing lower income people. Can the property tax exemption amount be higher than $100,000, which is woefully low today? No. Everyone has to pay, like it or not.
E. Who decides how my tax dollars are spent under the CPA? It should be the Select Board, but instead it is an unelected board that will likely be populated by people with time on their hands and a less-than-egalitarian attitude.
F. Why is the tax surcharge three percent? Couldn’t it be one or two percent? It has to be three percent because, at one or two percent, it wouldn’t collect enough to create the slush fund that the promoters need to spend on their favored projects.
G. What if there aren’t any worthwhile projects for spending the portion allocated to historic preservation and open space and recreation? Can those portions be transferred to housing? No, the money just sits there.
H. But it could be returned to the taxpayers, right? Not a chance.
I. Why not follow the same procedure we follow with all other expenditures, namely deciding at Town Meeting whether to approve a project and, if approved, how much to spend on it? That’s far too logical and democratic. We must first collect the tax so that the proponents of a project can say, “Well, we already have the money, so we might as well spend it.”
J. Are towns that have adopted the CPA spending the money on actually creating housing? Not according to the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts. Towns are spending too much on the non-housing categories, and what is allocated to housing often isn’t going to actually building some.
K. But that won’t happen in Egremont, right? Yeah, sure, trust me.
L. Can we unadopt the CPA if we end up not liking it? Theoretically yes. Guess how many towns have.
Please vote “NO” to passage of the CPA on Tuesday, May 13.
Richard Allen
Egremont
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