The Home Stretch

CCM’s Public Policy staff weigh in on the closing days of the long legislative session

New bills, amendments, and compromises are falling like snowflakes in New England winter, but it’s nearly June, and that means the end of the long legislative session is near. We asked Brian O’Connor and Randy Collins, Director and Deputy Director of Public Policy and Advocacy to speak to a few topics at the end of the session. Here’s what they told us…

The Budget: What’s keeping me up at night right now is the budget, and so we are very much looking at where we can provide additional aid to municipalities. Unfortunately, as many of you know, the legislature is really constrained by the fiscal guardrails. We think this is especially frustrating because we’re looking at a record surplus or a near record budget surplus for the seventh year in a row.

The State’s budget reserve is now in excess of $4 billion, and they’re actually looking to change the statutory cap on that to deposit another billion at a time when we’re seeing a lot of towns that are going through revaluations. Because of COVID, we’re seeing a significant shift from commercial value to residential value, which is really putting a strain on residential property taxes. And people are screaming for relief wherever the legislature can assist.

Education: One of the primary things were proactive on is education. We did see, of course, a substantial increase within the appropriations budget on the excess cost grant, which was a huge win, but we are still seeing what we might be able to do with the foundation grant. We think that’s one of the key issues going forward – and it hasn’t been updated since 2013. We’re also looking at potentially seeing if we can add a weight for special education or for students with disabilities and add that to the ECS formula.

Municipalities are confined to property tax revenue and state aid, and state aid has been consistent over the last few years. Not too long ago, when we were in consistent budget deficits, that wasn’t the case, but in light of a record surplus, state aid has not been keeping pace with just everyday costs going up. Municipalities are getting the same amount of revenue, yet, every single thing – insurance, energy costs, fuel costs, labor costs – all of those continue to rise.

We’re optimistic on a few of these issues, and SB 1511, which we’re going to continue to revisit, but there’s more to do. Most legislatures presume there’s going to be incremental change, we’ve got some ground on that, but it’s clear there’s still more to do.

Car Tax: We’re looking to get a little bit of relief with motor vehicle revenue. But year after year [the legislature] talks about getting rid of them. But we can look at the PILOT (Payments-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes), education; we’ve never been fully funded. One argument is – “pay for what you have on the books.”

And if you take on a billion-dollar revenue stream, are we going to be reimbursed dollar for dollar?

Not to mention towns who went through revaluations, they have to lower their mill rates to protect their property taxpayers, but that also reduces the motor vehicle reimbursement rate based on the cap that the legislature passed. We want them to – instead of having those numbers fall off immediately – to reduce them almost at a phase down over a five-year period to ease that sticker shock a little bit.

Housing: Right now, we are knee deep in housing. The House Democrats, led by Majority Leader Rojas, are putting together an omnibus bill that we are trying to work through. We just want a workable bill.

Our members are concerned about fair share, very concerned. We need to make sure that developers and certain non-profits don’t have the ability to sue municipalities if they believed that they were not moving forward on housing allocations. A report released at the end of May suggested that we needed 120,000 units, most of which would be for those who make 30% of the area median income. We don’t believe it was as expansive as that. There are some other components, of course, parking standards can be a compromise issue.

And one final point on that, one of our recommendations would be to simply have the COGs, the regional councils of governments do housing needs assessments. They are the boots on the ground, they have a good feel for their communities – what would work, knowing the infrastructure like water and sewer, and even the transit hubs – so I think that is an approach that we are going to move forward with.