The same elephant sat unnoticed in two different rooms this week. Neither the 8 Town Regional School District Planning Board’s report on the merger of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District with the Southern Berkshire Regional School District, nor the Great Barrington Select Board’s vote to recommend a $1.5 million study of a new high school, address the political obstacles caused by district agreements that have the eight towns paying wildly different property tax rates to support their districts:
Great Barrington: $11.96 per thousand of assessed valuation for FY2022
Stockbridge: $3.38
West Stockbridge: $8.23
Alford: $1.62
Egremont: $3.80
Monterey: $3.13
New Marlborough: $5.21
Sheffield: $11.07
This disparity, unless addressed effectively, is likely to doom a merger vote at future GB and Sheffield town meetings, and to reprise a defeat for a new (or highly renovated) high school at a future GB town meeting.
Jake Eberwein, the primary author of the 8 Town report, reached out to me last year for input, and I provided him a spreadsheet model (available to anyone upon request), showing how, if my recommendation for a unified tax rate were implemented, it would take 11 years for all taxpayers in the eight towns to reach parity in their educational tax rates, assuming an average annual increase of 5 percent in the school budgets. The general case for a unified rate can be found here .
As Peter Dillon, Berkshire Hill’s superintendent, correctly noted in an Edge story this week, the district’s operating agreement was revised so that future capital projects would be allocated among its three towns using a unified rate, and that this would lower GB’s share for a new high school to slightly more than 54 percent, a nearly 20 percent reduction. I believe he was wrong, however, to say, “That in itself is a huge deal.” A major capital project would be funded with 30-year bonds, which greatly lessens its annual budget impact. In spite of the fact that the bonds for the fairly-new Berkshire Hills middle and elementary schools are still being serviced, the BHRSD capital budget for FY2022 only represents 2.7 percent of the total assessment to the towns, with the operating budget accounting for the other 97.3 percent. A “20 percent reduction,” in other words, would only represent a negligible 0.5 percent lessening of the burden that has GB taxpayers paying 353.8 percent (3.5 times) the rate paid by Stockbridge taxpayers. Unless the operating budget is allocated using the same methodology as the capital budget (which adopted my model), the future of two commendable projects – the new high school and the merger of the two districts – is likely to come to an abrupt end in the town meetings of Great Barrington and Sheffield.
