Charlestown Taxes and the Election

Middle-class homeowners deserve a break

By Will Collette

Since the Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA Party) took control of Charlestown town government in 2008, we have had six straight property tax hikes, despite healthy surpluses. If the CCA Party is returned to power in November, expect tax increases #7 and #8 over the next two years.

However, the one time the CCA Party’s constituents raised a ruckus about taxes was in December 2011 when they grabbed their pitchforks and torches to support the town’s beachfront absentee property owners in opposing a Homestead Tax Credit proposal by town Democrats.

From the Charlestown Tax Assessor website

The Homestead Credit would have lowered taxes for most town residents, especially middle-class permanent residents, at the cost of a slight increase on million dollar properties owned largely by non-residents[*].

But not a Peep® out of them as the CCA Party took the town’s tax rate from $7.16 per $1000 of home value to $9.46. That’s a rate increase of 32%!

And contrary to what the CCA Party says, Charlestown DOES NOT have one of the state’s lowest tax rates (despite offering almost zero municipal services, as they even admit in their latest campaign mailing) – GoLocalProv’s research ranked Charlestown as #20 out of RI’s 39 cities and towns.

Screenshot from GoLocal. Note the footnote that levies for local fire
districts are not included. If they were, our ranking would be much
worse. Bottom line: the CCA claim about low taxes is false.

The reasons for the tax hikes – despite regular surpluses far in excess of what are needed to protect our credit rating – is the CCA Party choice to spend down the surpluses by (a) paying cash for capital projects that could have been financed with long-term, low-interest bonds; (b) paying off some bonds before they were due and (c) buying property, such as the $2.1 million expenditure for the land where developer Larry LeBlanc had proposed to build a wind turbine project or affordable housing.

So why no ruckus?

I think the reason CCA Party supporters went nuts over the Democrats’ middle-class tax relief plan and NOT the CCA Party’s actual six years’ worth of major tax hikes is because they’ve figured out other ways to game the system.

When I did the initial research in 2011 to support the push for the Homestead Credit, I discovered that Charlestown already has an array of tax-savings programs that include tax credits for low-income seniors, the disabled and blind plus several different types for veterans. There are exemptions for religious institutions (churches and parsonages), non-profits and state and federal property.

Since then, Progressive Charlestown has been regularly publicizing the existence of these exemptions because the town doesn’t. Because Cathy is permanently disabled and has been for a decade, we qualified but never knew about it until years later when I stumbled onto it while doing my research.

But it seems like there’s a CCA Party grapevine that spreads the word since so many of the CCA leaders and followers have signed up for these town tax-credit programs. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone who is qualified getting the tax relief. I do wish these tax breaks were at least known by everyone, not just the CCA crowd or for that matter Progressive Charlestown readers.

But wait, there’s more!

Most of these tax credits only amount to a few hundred dollars, though. The way to really cut your taxes by huge amounts is to slash the taxable value of your property by having it designated under the FFOS (Farm, Forest and Open Space) program. Under this program, your property becomes valued as little as one-quarter of what it’s worth as residential property, meaning three-quarters of your tax burden magically disappears.

FFOS is a great program when everyone has a fair crack at it

Again, I am fine with the idea of using tax incentives to encourage land uses that are good for the community. But everyone should know about how these land conservation programs work and have a fair and equal shot at qualifying. It should not be an insider game.

Here is the DEM guidebook to FFOS.

If you have five acres that could pass for a farm or ten acres that could pass as forest or open space, you could dramatically reduce your property tax assessment. 

Then, who cares if the CCA Party bumps up the tax rate by a couple of dimes every year?

The great thing about these exemptions is that you can continue to use the property as you see fit and, after 15 years, you can drop out of the program with no penalty.

If you use the town Tax Assessor database to check out properties in and around Arnolda, for example, you’ll run into a lot of wild variations in assessments. Amid very high-end properties, you’ll find other lands and properties with amazingly low assessments zoned as “OS” for open space, “other vacant land,” “vacant not developed” and so on, where the bottom line for property tax assessments are a lot lower than those of equivalent properties.

The Van Slyke property from the Charlestown Tax Assessor database.
The 2006 sale price was $500,000 but with a 30% open space designation,
the assessment drops to $16,700. Nice deal!

Take, for example, the properties owned by Bonnita and John Van Slyke. Bonnita Van Slyke is running for Town Council on the CCA Party ticket. They have two properties on Arnolda Round Road. One property is one acre designated as “30% open space” (0.3 acres, I guess, which is a lot less than the state FFOS standard of ten acres).

Anyway, the one acre property with the 30% open space designation is assessed at $16,700 even though it has a dock and a deck, while their adjacent 1.65-acre vacant lot zoned R3A is assessed at $267,300. That shows you the dramatic difference an open-space designation can make, in this instance, at least a 90% difference in assessment for adjacent properties. It's an assessment drop of 97% from the 2006 sales price of $500,000. 

Their house on South Arnolda, sitting on almost 11 acres, is assessed at $908,400.

Entrance to George Tremblay's 57 acreas with trailer.
Google Earth screenshot

Then there’s George Tremblay, who is running for re-election to the Town Council on the CCA Party slate (he’s the one with the junked-out wooden trailer marking the entrance road to his 57.41-acre property. Those 57+ acres, along with the house and a bunch of outbuildings, are classified as “forest,” thus lowering his assessment to $364,200 for the whole shebang.

Barbara Heavers, who is running for Planning Commission on the CCA Party ticket, has 161 acres with not one, but two houses on it – the second house gets rented out – but past use as farmland cuts the assessment for the whole property to just $354,800.

Ms. Heavers did not declare the rental property on her financial disclosure report to the RI Ethics Commission.

Sometimes the tax savings come wholesale

Two of the CCA Party’s strongest bastions also have the town’s most peculiar tax break. The Shady Harbor and Quonochontaug Central neighborhoods each have their own special Fire Districts that have nothing to do with fighting fires. No trucks, no fire-fighters, not even a fire extinguisher. They do have tennis courts, boating facilities, snow plowing, trash pick-up, public water, etc., that are provided as part of Fire District membership.

The taxable property owned by the Fire District is incredibly undervalued with tax assessments that border on the insane (see photo to the right). 

The members pay a Fire District property tax that includes all these swell amenities, as well as actual fire protection purchased from the Dunn’s Corner Fire District. The kicker is that all those amenities – water, tennis, plowing, trash removal – are folded into the District tax and are thus tax-deductible on residents’ state and federal income taxes.

Suckers like the rest of us have to deal with the costs of our own water, trash, plowing, maintenance, etc., without being able to deduct any of it from our taxes.

Get all the details about these phony fire districts by clicking here.

Parlay your tax savings like Ruth

There are very few people in Charlestown who could pull off a tax trifecta like Planning Commissar Ruth Platner and her husband and Zoning Board member Cliff Vanover did. 

Between a conservation easement for much of the land, farming a piece of it, and doing a major expansion to their house that is never completed, Ruth and Cliff have reduced their tax assessment to a fraction of what other properties of similar size and location are assessed.

They’ve gotten the assessment of their 13.5 acres and ever-expanding house down to just $199,700.

If everybody got a deal, no one would get a deal

Maybe the real reason why the CCA Party is so set against granting broad property tax relief is that this might cut into their constituents’ ability to make special deals.

That may also be why there is no effort by the town to make information about various tax deals easily and broadly accessible – maybe by sending out a special issue of the Poopline.

Again, if everybody knows all the angles, they aren’t worth as much to those in the know.

To distract people’s attention from the inequities in the way Charlestown’s tax load is distributed, the CCA Party has instead resorted to scapegoating. Chariho and the Charlestown families who send their children to Chariho have been used as a convenient distraction, even to the point where the CCA Party created a boogey monster – the fictitious “single taxing district.”

That’s what we get instead of middle-class tax relief. Boogey monsters, tax hikes for all but big tax deals for the few. Remember this on Tuesday, November 4.

FOOTNOTE

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[*] An interesting sidenote is that the Rhode Island town that offers the highest Homestead Tax Exemption is Lincoln, the actual home of the unofficial CCA Party candidate for House District 36, Blake Filippi. They offer a 35% valuation reduction

A Interlude with nothing to do with Charlestown taxes

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