Editor’s note: This commentary is by Charles Simpson, of Burlington, a former Progressive Party candidate for Burlington City Council, who is active with People for Peace and Security.
On Feb. 16, the Burlington Free Press highlighted homes in three Chittenden County communities. Roughly the same size, they were priced the same, between $269,900 and $272,500. The difference was the property tax. An owner in Colchester would pay only 81% of the property tax owed in Burlington; a Williston owner would pay 62% of what the same house would be taxed in Burlington. Why the disparity?
It’s not because these surrounding towns don’t have schools, libraries, and parks. They do. The sharp tax disparity is due, in part, to municipal expenditures. In a word, Burlington supports “vanity projects” having little or no utility — they may have negative utility — but cost plenty.
A $50 million limited highway between Home and Lakeside avenues that wastes the potential of the Enterprise District is one. A $5.8 million makeover of City Hall Park to install pulsating fountains is another. Now we have the Moran “Frame Project” projected to cost $6.5 million simply to stabilize and remove toxics, leaving the empty skeleton of the structure, presumably as a monument to our industrial past. It would take more millions to make the skeleton at all usable. Then there’s $15 million to renovate Memorial Auditorium. While we need to keep Memorial as our public civic venue, promoting a venue with 2,000 seats and no structured parking is idiotic and a step to failure, wasted resources, and more privatization. And so it goes.
What’s common to each is a grifter’s sleight-of-hand — the claim that “someone else will pay for it.” National taxpayers will buy us the parkway; a philanthropist will give us the park; and we’ll raid the state education fund to pay for Moran through TIF.
TIF means that schoolchildren in depressed areas of, say, Caledonia County, will for 20 years be deprived of 70% of the tax revenue used to repay the $5.6 million borrowed for Moran. Add to that the additional $21.8 million in TIF scheduled to build streets internal to Brookfield’s City Place. Other developers of large projects, say Cambrian Rise, pay for their internal streets; billion-dollar Brookfield gets a free ride on the backs of those children.
In each case, “someone else” turns out to be “us.” We’ll retrofit and maintain the parkway in perpetuity; we’ll pay 80% of what the park costs; and we depend on the same education fund that the Northeast Kingdom relies on so our school tax will rise.
Who benefits from all this sleight-of-hand? In the case of Moran, it’s the nonprofits that own 44% of the land and 31% of our property value. Burlington Electric Department has legal liability for Moran including its cleanup. If BED took responsibility, that cost would be shared by all electric users, including the nonprofits. TIF shifts the obligation to property tax payers, renters, and those school kids. Any wonder why the same house is taxed up to 60% more in Burlington?
