by John Osborn
Just a few days before Annual Town Meeting, a key committee has reversed its position on a proposal to raise the property tax surcharge that funds many of Harvard’s community preservation projects.
In a split vote, members of the Finance Committee voted 4-3 at their meeting this Wednesday not to back an increase in the Community Preservation Act surcharge from 1.1 to 3.0 percent, as proposed by Article 36 of the town warrant.
Both the Finance Committee and the Board of Selectmen are now on record against the measure.
The Community Preservation Committee, which oversees the surcharge money that flows to the Community Preservation Fund, voted in March to support the measure, though that 3-2-1 vote was a divided one.
The members of the Community Preservation Committee learned of the Finance Committee turn-about just as they were adjourning their own meeting on Wednesday evening, a meeting at which they had just decided not to revisit their own position on the surcharge. As of Friday, there was no word from vice chair Debbie Ricci on whether there might be a different outcome when the panel meets one last time at 8:30 a.m. Saturday morning before Town Meeting convenes.
According to Finance Committee secretary Laura Vilain, the Finance Committee voted three times on Wednesday, first on whether to reconsider their original position, then to explicitly recommend against the article, and finally to urge the Selectmen to appoint an ad hoc committee to study the matter when a newly elected board convenes next week.
The vote to reconsider was unanimous, with George McKenna abstaining, because he had not been present for the original vote.
In the vote to recommend against passage, McKenna, Steve Colwell, Alice von Loesecke, and Heidi Frank voted for the motion, while chair Marie Fagan and members Bob Thurston and Rudy Minar opposed it.
Colwell, who first urged an increase in the surcharge and who wrote the Committee’s argument in favor of the measure (which appears on page 44 of the Town Meeting warrant book), will now write the majority argument against it, according to Vilain.
Many of the arguments that led to Wednesday evening’s change of heart were presented this week in a letter to the Harvard Press written by associate member Alan Frazer. In his letter, Frazer argued that a 3 percent surcharge would raise money at a faster rate than the annual 2.5 percent tax increases levied each year by the town. The Community Preservation Act would lock Harvard into that rate for at least five years, though there was no plan for how the money would be used, Frazer wrote.
Proponents of the increase have argued in the past, however, that even though specific plans are not in place, the categories for which the additional money can be used are known. They include conservation, open space land purchases, housing, and preservation of historic buildings. It is also known, proponents have argued, that money will have to be spent on Town Hall, Hildreth House, and the old library over the next five years and community preservation funds could be used to pay for work on the historic portions of those buildings.
The roughly $900,000 that’s unspent and available for conservation and land acquisition today, in their view, is an insurance policy for the future.
In his letter to the Press, Frazer also argued that the Selectmen should “organize an ad hoc group to perform comprehensive due diligence for increasing the surcharge rate.” On that recommendation, which Frazer repeated Wednesday evening, the Finance Committee was in complete agreement, and the members voted unanimously to “suggest” the next Board of Selectmen study the matter.
Town residents will get to weigh in tomorrow, Saturday morning, when the question of whether to increase the surcharge will come before them. In Massachusetts, committees recommend, but Town Meeting always has the last word.