Stormwater fees effectively raise taxes, violating spirit of state limits
While yes, the enactment of the stormwater fee mechanism was approved at Town Meeting, I’d ask where it originated.
I’d like to address points made in a July 10 letter to the editor regarding my June 19 letter concerning stormwater fees.
While yes, the enactment of the stormwater fee mechanism was approved at Town Meeting, I’d ask where it originated. I’m sure town officials were the genesis of the proposal, and I wonder how many voters really understood the implications.
With a $1,062,800 fiscal year 2026 budget partially paid for by residential property owners (59%), that’s over $600,000 those owners pay on top of their town taxes. A key question I raised was whether town taxes would go down as a result of these shifted expenses. My suspicion was that they would not. Do you think the town will ever choose not to increase taxes as much as is allowed? I’m confident we’d all find the purported savings to be quite illusory.
And if the fee structure isn’t perfect, why not try to make it more realistically measure the actual burden on our infrastructure? I imagine the work to calculate for each property the square footage of impervious area was substantial. And yet the effort to factor into the formula the overall property size would be quite trivial. And with a little effort, determining proximity to stormwater infrastructure should also be possible.
I assume some people desire to have the town’s charities with tax-exempt properties pay more. But the suggested improvements in the formula would certainly make both charities and commercial properties cover their fair share of the costs, especially those with large parking lots.
Massachusetts Proposition 2½ was enacted to ensure property taxes didn’t become overly burdensome to residents. If a town uses methods like stormwater fees to effectively increase taxes beyond that limit, it violates the spirit and intention of that law.
Charles Ziering
Simon Willard Road
