UPDATED: With Video: Charlestown Budget passes

Taxes going up, for no particularly good reason, by 16 cents per thousand

By Will Collette

UPDATE: as predicted, only a small number of people came out to vote - 238 in total. By a margin of 146 to 92, they approved the budget with its 16 cent per $1000 tax hike.

A small handful of Charlestown voters are likely to turn out to vote on June 3 (Monday, not Tuesday) to approve Charlestown’s $26 million-plus budget. 

Unless something truly amazing happens, the budget will be approved, largely because the bulk of the voters come from the Charlestown Citizen Alliance’s stronghold in Charlestown’s third precinct, and this is a CCA Party-driven budget.

Why do I make this prediction? The CCA Party’s actual voter bloc is concentrated among elderly, affluent retirees in the southwest quadrant of Charlestown where the high-end beach front property is located.

Statistically, their demographic tends to vote at higher rates than the more working class neighborhoods of Charlestown, especially North of One.

And the CCA Party voter bloc votes solidly for whatever the CCA Party puts out there, even if it’s not in their self-interest, whether it’s goofy candidates or higher taxes.

In this upcoming budget vote, count on these voters to approve a budget that will increase property taxes rates for everyone by 16 cents per $1000 of assessed property value. It isn’t actual budget expenditures that are driving this tax increase, but a decision by the fiscal austerians on the Budget Commission to spend over $3 million from Charlestown’s over-abundant budget surplus on capital expenditures.

Source: Charlestown Treasurer Patricia Anderson

According to data provided to me by Charlestown Treasurer Pat Anderson, the town will have a projected fund balance at the end of this fiscal year of $7,722,763, which is huge, given that our annual budget for the year was also around $26 million.

We have far more than the town’s financial advisors suggest, so we have “excess undesignated funds” to burn off.

My choice would be to use those funds to provide tax relief to Charlestown residents.

However, budget austerians have decided to instead plunk down $386,500 to re-pave Klondike Road and to spend another $2,807,728 to pay off the USDA loan that covered the construction cost of the Police Station before that loan is actually due. The USDA told the town that we might not be eligible to continue to carry that low-interest loan in the future. However, the USDA might not get around to actually making it official that Charlestown needs to pay off the loan for another year, two years or more.

After we finish paying off the Police Station loan and the Klondike Road project, we will have reduced our budget surplus to $4,528,535 which is a nice, healthy 17% of our total projected budget.

I know it’s nice to have so much extra cash that we can reduce the town’s overall long-term debt. However, this is going to be done at the expense of taxpayers who are still burdened by the effects of our long recession that has left Charlestown with an average annual unemployment rate of 11.4%. 

The official unemployment rate doesn’t include people who have dropped out of the workforce or have taken part-time or much lower paying jobs. Plus, we have lots of homeowners who are still underwater on the mortgages.

But, as I’ve reported before, these are not problems the CCA Party leadership actually sees, and certainly not anything its core constituency of landed gentry actually experiences.

Normally, I would never, ever, cite a quote like this to support one of my arguments. But given the sainted status accorded dead President Ronald Reagan by so many of the CCA Party luminaries, I find it apt: "Simple fairness dictates that government must not raise taxes on families struggling to pay their bills." (Ronald Reagan, State of the Union address, January 25, 1984)

Don't ask me what I want it for
If you don't want to pay some more
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman
- The Beatles

CCA Party Town Councilor Dan Slattery tried to rationalize the 16 cent per $1000 tax hike by saying that under Rhode Island law, the town could have raised taxes even higher, up to the state property tax cap of 4%.

The 16 cent tax hike is “only” a rise of 1.72% which will take our tax rate from the current $9.30 to $9.46. If the CCA Town Council majority had decided instead to raise taxes the full legal limit of 4%, the tax hike could have been 37 cents, instead of 16 cents. 

Based on Councilor Slattery’s logic, Charlestown taxpayers “saved” 21 cents.

Except the flaw in Slattery’s logic is that Charlestown doesn’t need to raise taxes by 37 cents or 16 cents or even 1 cent with its surplus of almost $8 million. 

Just because you can raise taxes by 37 cents or 16 cents doesn’t mean you should. Especially when you’re sitting on a $7.7 million surplus.

What Slattery and his CCA Party cohorts are really saying is that they are raising taxes on Charlestown property owners because they can, and that we should be damned grateful that they don’t raise it more.

I have no dispute with the funding for Charlestown governmental operations. The increases for town departments are very modest. I also have no quibble with the town’s single largest expenditure – Charlestown’s share of the Chariho School District budget, especially since Charlestown’s actual share is less than last year and may drop even more if Richmond and Hopkinton voters force even more budget cuts on the school system.

Source: Charlestown Tax Assessor

So I am not suggesting that any of you vote against this budget. Instead, I want you to remember that the CCA Party has consistently raised taxes during its reign over this town and has consistently rejected tax relief for middle-class residents.

Indeed, if you look at tax rates since 2000, you’ll notice that starting with Fiscal Year 2009, the first budget during the six-year reign of the CCA right after the CCA Party’s five-member slate swept into office, taxes have gone up every single year.

Presuming voters approve the budget on June 3, taxes under the CCA Party will have gone up by $2.02 or 27.2% even though we have run large surpluses.

That includes the big 2011 tax hike that followed town-wide revaluations where $1 million plus properties ended up being revalued in such a way that the owners of those high-end properties – 65% of whom are non-residents – actually got a tax cut.

Then, when town Democrats proposed a homestead tax exemption for permanent residents that would have restored balance to our taxes, the CCA Party and its unacknowledged parent, the RI Statewide Coalition, organized the riot of the rich to give the CCA Party Town Council majority the political cover it needed to reject that tax fairness initiative. And they said they were killing tax relief for middle-class residents in the interest of “fairness” and maintaining “harmony” in town.

They did that by taking the class war waged by Charlestown's 1% against everyone else to a higher level.

Let’s not forget that last year, the CCA Party wanted to spend the town’s excess surplus by paying cash for the derelict YMCA camp – the infamous “Y-Gate” scandal...as they were raising property taxes by 24 cents per $1000.

The CCA Party keeps promising that by taxing at levels that generates excess surpluses every year, and then spending that excess surplus on capital expenditures that could be bonded at very low interest rates, they are somehow “saving” Charlestown taxpayers money…in the long run.

Except, it’s now been six years of those policies. Taxes have gone up by 27.2%. Where the hell are those promised savings?

Hopefully, more of those middle-class voters will come out to vote, not just for special budget elections like the one on June 3^rd, but the all-important general elections. Then we might see a fairer tax system in this town.

There's only one polling station for all voters - Town Hall from 8 AM to 8 PM on Monday (not Tuesday).