To the editor:
If you want lower taxes, do it one percentage at a time. There are no quick fixes. You have to work hard, study hard, and find the little things where a point can be shaved off the tax rate. In Stockbridge, every point translates to between $20 and $300 per taxpayer per year, depending on the value of your property.
Let me address points raised by John Morse in The Berkshire Edge on April 17. Mr. Morse referenced the fund to pay the cost of future retirement benefits, Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB). Our town OPEB fund stands at $3.8 million, which earned over $300,000 in interest this past year. It is funded at over 80 percent, which by law allows us to use a portion to pay for current OPEB liabilities. This would reduce the property-tax levy.
Funding OPEB didn’t come for free. We did that with your property taxes. Our current OPEB liability for fiscal year 2025 stands at around $140,000. If we paid this out of the more than $300,000 in interest we earned last year on this fund, we wouldn’t have decreased the fund’s principal and taxpayers would have saved 1.5 percent this year. I supported this. The Finance Committee Chair and my colleagues on the Select Board did not.
Mr. Morse and a few members of the Finance Committee have made the claim that accessing the town’s OPEB reserves might impact the town’s future cost of borrowing by impacting Stockbridge’s credit rating. I point out that Stockbridge enjoys a similar credit rating as many surrounding towns. Only a handful of towns statewide have funded their OPEB liability.
Second, even if this claim were true, and it is not, the difference in the cost of borrowing from a municipal credit score of AA vs. AA+ or AA+ to AAA is five basis points, or five hundredths of one percent. Per $1 million of borrowing, this amounts to a difference in average annual costs of around $300 to the entire municipal budget, or roughly 20 cents per taxpayer per year.
It is questionable whether the cost to fund OPEB, which in aggregate amounted to $2,500 per taxpayer to date, was the best use of each individual taxpayer’s money.
I would also like to point out that the Berkshire Hills Regional School District has an unfunded OPEB liability of over $60 million. Of that amount, Stockbridge’s share is roughly 25 percent, or $15 million. This sounds scary. However, did you know that the vast majority of municipalities do not set aside these funds? They fund OPEB out of the current year’s operating budget.
Rather than taking the time to debate these issues, folks seem to come into budget meetings with their minds made up. This discussion a few weeks ago was less than three minutes in length. Reasonable folks disagreed. We could have put an item on the Town Meeting Warrant and let the voters decide, after hearing both sides. That would have given the Finance Committee the chance to do its job, which is to advise the voters at Town Meeting, especially if there is an issue open to debate. I remind everyone that the voters are the decision makers, not the Select Board or the Finance Committee.
As for deferred maintenance, I recognize Mr. Morse left the Finance Committee over a decade ago. Our town administrator and I both started our respective jobs in 2020. I credit the town administrator for changing the culture of deferred maintenance. I credit the Select Board of 2020, which was comprised of Roxanne McCaffrey, Chuck Cardillo, and me, for taking his advice and changing course on this rather disastrous policy. It was a policy that cost the town dearly in bridges that needed to be replaced and yet could have been repaired for one-tenth of the cost several years earlier. It was a policy that resulted in a tremendous amount of time spent by highway department employees repairing rickety old equipment rather than replacing it on a fleet schedule, thus giving them more time to do their actual jobs of plowing and and maintaining our roads.
Finally, Mr. Morse points to the COVID stabilization fund. I note to Mr. Morse that in addition to creating the fund, the town also reduced the revenue projection for occupancy and meals taxes that year. This resulted in double-taxing our taxpayers for this COVID contingency, adding approximately four percent to the town’s budget that fiscal year. Mistakes happen. This was one of them.
Finally, I would like to address the question of the reserve fund for fiscal 2025. The initial draft budget had it set at $150,000, an amount we never used. I proposed reducing it to $100,000, which would reduce the tax burden by approximately 0.5 percent. While initially opposed by both the Finance Committee chair and my colleagues, the Select Board ultimately took the town administrator’s recommendation when he endorsed my proposal. One colleague dismissed the suggestion, stating, “For $50,000 in an $11 million budget, it’s not a lot of money.” I could not be more philosophically opposed to this approach to budgeting.
We all learn from each other, from past mistakes, and from best practices of surrounding towns. Let’s be cautious about giving credit where it is due and avoid rewriting history to make a politically expedient argument.
Patrick White
Stockbridge
The writer is a Stockbridge Select Board member.
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