“We have nickel-and-dimed people too much. We need to look at our revenue,” State Representative Jen Benson told the Harvard School Committee at its Oct. 26 meeting. Benson, who chaired the Lunenburg School Committee prior to her election to state office, serves on the legislature’ s Education Committee and represents the district that includes Harvard.
Benson discussed the financial challenges that face school districts and the state as a whole. She noted that towns can achieve some savings through regional cooperation on matters such as transportation and food service, while retaining local autonomy in other matters. But she stated that neither minor savings nor narrow, targeted tax increases, such as a gas tax, would solve the structural deficits that confront both state and local governments.
Benson said, “I don’t have the numbers,” but she has heard rumors of planned cuts in local aid. She stated that she would not support such cuts. “To continually go back to the well of local aid is not the way to solve the problem,” she said. Committee member Stu Sklar recalled that Harvard’s Fiscal Impact Analysis Team concluded earlier this year that the town has a revenue problem, not a spending problem. Benson concurred, saying that the state faces the same difficulty.
Benson pointed out that Massachusetts ranks 38th in the U.S. in the percentage of residents’ income that goes to state taxes, according to a report by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. (A spokesperson for the foundation stated that a more recent ranking showed Massachusetts in 37th place.) She asserted that the increase in state revenues, particularly from the capital gains tax, during the years before the 2009 recession concealed the $4 billion structural deficit that the state had created by tax cuts during the 1990s. When the recession led to a sharp drop in capital gains, she said, the state “hit the wall.”
Audience member Bruce Leicher pointed out that the squeeze from state aid cuts is forcing towns like Harvard and Concord to raise property taxes, many of whose residents are on fixed or reduced incomes. Benson agreed that this is a major problem, saying, “We need to be looking at sustainability and fairness. Over-reliance on the property tax is forcing people out of towns. It is the most regressive form of taxation.”
Sklar suggested that the state needed to consider either a graduated income tax or a local option income tax to replace part of the property tax. Leicher also suggested that a local-option income tax would allow towns to shift some of the tax burden away from low-income seniors and family farms. However, Benson pointed out that both those proposed solutions would require a state constitutional amendment, which few legislators would be willing to support in the current political climate.
Benson reported that she gets calls regularly from “people who believe you can never cut enough—who say we should close down state government because we don’t need it.” A real dichotomy exists, she noted, over what good government is and what citizens are willing to pay for it. Local boards of selectmen face the same pressures, she said. “No one wants to be the bad guy.”
Sklar drew a rueful laugh from the room by responding, “Someone has to be the bad guy. That’s what you run for local office for.”
