Once again Mainers who live on the coast are under siege. We are victims of Maine’s property tax law, which requires town assessors to calculate our taxes based on the “highest and best use” of our homesteads. Unfortunately, this market driven philosophy assumes that we all want to sell out to the folks who can and will spend whatever it takes to own a piece of the Maine Coast. But what about the people whose families have always lived on the coast? What about the people who hung on during the 1950s when you couldn’t give away an island house and Portland banks wouldn’t even consider mortgaging island real estate? What about people who are defined by the place they live? What about people who don’t want to sell their one-hundred-year-old family homes and move inland?
This is a statewide problem. How do we maintain the traditional Maine landscape with traditional Mainers living in traditional houses when our tax structure assumes that we all see our homes as financial investments and are just biding our time to cash in when the folks with the big bucks knock at our doors?
Nobody likes to pay taxes, but we are realists and having read Thoreau, we know what can happen if you don’t pay what someone has determined as your “fair share.” We all ask the essential question, “Is the `fair share’ fair?” A group of Mainers, frustrated by rising property taxes, circulated a petition to cap taxes. The Maine Taxpayers Action Network’s apparently failed petition drive asks, “Do you want to limit property taxes to 1% of the assessed value of the property?” This question has stimulated discussion throughout the state and spurred many state and local officials to call for a comprehensive overhaul of local and state taxation. The Maine Municipal Association and numerous state and local politicians are taking a crack at tax reform. But no one in Augusta is talking about creating programs that would help to keep people who have no intention of selling out from being victimized by the current market driven assessments. Sometimes, the politicians can’t see the forest for the trees.
Trees. We protect trees in Maine by granting landowners property tax relief through state programs and conservation easements. Once this is done the real estate market no longer drives the land’s value. In some cases, property taxes are dramatically reduced. If a landowner decides to take land out of Tree Growth he or she must compensate the town for the taxes that would have been paid if the land had not been in Tree Growth. This is a very simplistic explanation of a complex subject, but you get the point. The landowner is free to sell his property at market price, but the Town gets its “fair share” of the profit.
People. If we can protect trees in such a straightforward way, why not apply the same principles to the homes of people who have no desire to sell out to the highest bidder? After much deliberation an idea is on the table (the kitchen table, that is) that could be the answer to Maine’s property tax dilemma and create affordable housing to boot.
This initiative would be open to anyone in a community who wants to place his primary residence and adjoining land into the program. The assessed value of the property would be decreased by a significant percentage, maybe even 50 percent. Property taxes would then be based on the new value. If they sold or willed the property to someone who wanted to stay in the program, nothing would change. If people decided they wanted to sell their property in the future they could do so. Realizing that circumstances change, homeowners would be allowed to remove their land from the program by paying the town the difference between the actual taxes that would have been assessed and the reduced taxes they actually paid. The homeowner would also pay interest on the difference. The actual taxes would be based on the selling price of the house.
Critics will claim that towns would go broke when the entire population signs up. Let’s be realistic. This program is not for everyone. It is not for the mobile majority of Americans who move every three to five years. It is not for the real estate speculator who sees his home as a potential windfall. This program is for the person who is deeply rooted in a community and has no intention of moving on. It is for the widow or the retired fisherman or farmer whose fixed income will never keep pace with the outside pressures on the real estate market. This program is for families who want to pass their homes on to their descendants. This program is for young families looking for affordable housing. This program is an alternative whose time has come.
We, the people, who are in our communities for the long haul, have the power. We have the power of initiative and referendum. We can no longer sit around and complain about high taxes. We must act or we will find ourselves forced out of the communities that help to define who we are.
If the State of Maine can protect trees, it has the ability to protect people too.
Donna Miller Damon is a resident of Chebeague Island, which is part of Cumberland.