Editor’s Note: The Berkshire Edge requested interviews with both Ed Abrahams and John Beebe, his opponent for a seat on the Select Board. Beebe did not respond. Balloting takes place Tuesday, May 13.
“I’m by nature a non-spender, as anyone who’s been to my house in winter knows,” says Great Barrington Board of Selectman candidate Ed Abrahams of his dialed-down thermostat. “My daughter plays piano in fingerless gloves.”
High taxes are the issue in this election, and while Abrahams has looked hard, he says he has not seen much “fat in the budget to cut,” just as “a lot of family budgets have no more fat in them, either.”
“I’m a fiscal conservative, not a knee-jerk budget cutter,” he explained.
Budgets, says Abrahams, who is chair of the Library Board of Trustees, are something he’s good at. After a career as a senior executive in a small retail clothing chain with 600 employees, he had a 20-year career managing and starting nonprofits, and staging their large events. That grew into work as a nonprofit sector fundraising and management consultant.
Abrahams, who has lived in Great Barrington for almost 15 years, decided to stay home with his two daughters after his wife, Shelley, died in 2007. When he wasn’t parenting, he was a volunteer for Hospice Care of the Berkshires, Construct, Berkshire South Community Center, and all three public schools in the Berkshire Hills Regional School District.
“The way people talk to each other about politics locally bothers me,” he says of his decision to run for selectman. “This is a community filled with smart people.” It is natural, he says, to have different ideas about how to solve problems, and “when you get past the slogans, you find you don’t really disagree.”
But with the property tax rate on the increase and Monument Mountain Regional High School in need of serious renovation, many Great Barrington residents are feeling the pinch and fear it may get sharper.
“We’re not wasting money; that’s not the problem,” says Abrahams. He cites examples: the school district’s 26 fewer employees than a few years ago; the new school budget’s 2.5 fewer teachers from last year; the number of Department of Public Works employees cut by half. His favorite example is that Great Barrington’s firemen “don’t get paid at all.”
“The problem and consequently the solution are state reimbursement formulas which are 20 to 40 years old and don’t favor rural towns,” Abrahams says. The school district has been receiving an average of 73 percent of the promised 100 percent of transportation costs since 2008. That’s no small chunk of change with an annual transportation budget of a million dollars plus.
“That’s money we’re not spending on teachers and sports and theater,” says Abrahams.
The district, he says, should also receive higher reimbursements for students who choice into Berkshire Hills from other districts. Indeed, the cost of educating one student in FY2013 was $16,106, but the reimbursement rate for out-of-district students was capped at $5,000, a rate less than charter schools will receive. For most schools this averages out in the end, as roughly the same number of students choice out as choice in. But Berkshire Hills has more students coming in than going out.
“If there was anything easy to cut it’s been cut,” says Abrahams of the school budget. “We’re not getting reimbursed at a high enough rate to cover expenses.”
As for the much feared renovation: Abrahams says he supported it because he took the school committee at its word that it would cost more to do the repairs, which the town voted down. “Democracy’s a beautiful thing,” he says, “but saying we can’t afford it so we’re not doing anything is not an answer.”
What is the answer? The school committee is considering a change in financing, cutting some amenities, or speeding up the construction process. “Or we can wait and hope we don’t lose our roof and our boiler in the meantime.”
“It’s all complicated and none of it lends itself to (campaign) slogans,” he says of much bandied about ideas to ease taxpayers’ pocketbook pain. Regionalization — the sharing of services like fire engines — might save money and be more efficient. Proposed tax structure changes might help. Great Barrington is business friendly, says Abrahams, but as the old manufacturing model disappears, we need to “incubate the local, the homegrown creativity, which we have a lot of.”
The jobs that replaced manufacturing here in the Northeast are lower paying, and when large employers like the paper company leave, there’s a “huge hit to the tax base.”
“The paper mill is no longer paying taxes, no longer paying the water bill; that’s why the sewer bill is so high.” He cites increasing broadband access as a way to make it possible for more technology and Internet related businesses to take root. But none of this “will increase the tax base unless they either build or improve on real estate — that’s how we make our money here.”
“Two thirds of the land in Great Barrington is either government or nonprofit or farming and consequently pays little or no taxes. Farmland gets a great tax benefit. So that leaves about one third of land and the bulk of the taxes paid by homeowners and businesses.” Abrahams says that spreading that out might help.
And what about a penny gas tax? “I can hear people screaming: not another tax!” says Abrahams. But like the hotel and meals tax, it’s a way to tax visitors, and “it eases the burden on property tax.” He says that outright resistance to any new tax sometimes undermines other tax relief.
He has been up and down Main Street, listening to Great Barrington and Housatonic merchants and residents, and despite waves of tax terror, Abrahams says that he hasn’t “heard anyone say they don’t like living here. The town is in great financial health, and the bond rating is good. It is expensive to run the town, but we have great police and fire departments, amazing libraries.”
Abrahams supported the Community Preservation Act. “Some of that money will be used to offset taxes,” he says, and he thinks that using some of those funds to fix Ramsdell Library would be good. “It should be used to enhance the town in ways that we can count. That will actually help do things tax dollars could do or just make the place worth more.”
“As a voter I’ve been very skeptical about spending,” says Abrahams. But he says that as a candidate who has educated himself by attending numerous Select Board and town committee meetings, he has seen democracy at work. He mentions the outcry over the plastic bag ban, yet the town did the right thing, he says: “As groups we know better than individuals. But it’s not fun to be on the wrong end of democracy.”
Running for office can be unpleasant, too. The local Republican Party and his opponent’s supporters, says Abrahams, have conducted a smear campaign by twisting an 11-year-old issue with his next door neighbor, the Mason Library. When the Town had plans to expand the library right up to his property line, cut down trees and build a parking lot, the town manager at the time failed to respond to his letters. Abrahams did not hire a lawyer but he did file a complaint with the Superior Court, pro se, to overturn the special permit the Select Board had granted the Library. His opponent’s supporters say he sued the town, but that is not what the documents show.
The issue was resolved with a handshake in the end, lawyer free, with Abrahams getting everything he wanted from the town in terms of screening and mitigation. Abrahams has a page on his website ( https://edforgb.webs.com/ ) devoted to the issue in an attempt to put it to bed: “A citizen defending his property against an unresponsive government official,” writes Abrahams, “standing up to the town without access to lawyers, having to go through all of this just to get the town government to listen, seems like something the Republican Party would applaud.”
The so called “library controversy,” he says, is a campaign-fueled distraction from the nitty-gritty of solutions, and has nothing to do with who is better qualified to be Selectman. His opponent John Beebe, writes Abrahams, “has yet to attend a single Board of Selectman meeting, never managed a budget or hired anyone for anything. He thought our town had a budget deficit, he didn’t even know that by law, we must balance the budget.”
