Waterfront taxes

It is no accident that voters will be asked to change the state constitution under Question 4 next month to provide property tax relief to owners of land used as working waterfront and, as they leave the voting place, likely will be confronted with a petition to raise the state share of school funding and thereby relieve pressure on the property tax. That tax does a lot of work, and any time one group wants its share reduced, the public should keep in mind that others will have to pick up the slack.

Helping to provide fishermen access to Maine’s few remaining miles of working waterfront, however, is a worthy cause. As with forest and farmland, which have their own tax breaks, taxing waterfront on its highest potential use has distinct disadvantages to a state that cherishes its current use, commercial fishing. The key to balancing the obligation to pay a fair share of taxes with the need to keep them low enough so that fishermen are not driven off the coast is to find the proper financial penalty for those landowners who take part in such a tax break and later sell out to development.

Both tree growth and farmland programs have such penalties, although the one for farmland may be so high that it discourages families from applying for the tax break. Supporters of the amendment envision the state compensating towns for lost property tax revenue, but the state money, naturally, is also going to come from taxpayers, mostly through sales and income taxes. Being a constitutional amendment, Question 4 merely directs the Legislature to write rules that lower the tax level without going into a lot of details. The public should be aware that among those rules could be a provision that allowed Maine to recover some of the lost property taxes if a landowner cashed in that quarter mile of shorefront Down east to build McMansions.

Maintaining access to the coast is not just something nice voters could do for a traditional way of living here. The total landed value from all fishing last year was $322 million. Maine has approximately 26,000 year-round jobs related to fishing and 6,950 vessels in the industry. The owners of those boats need access so they can move their tons and tons of gear -towing wire, scallop draggers, winches, traps, buoys, toggles – from land to boat and back again. The few places with public access are already too busy and cannot provide places to store all the gear on land.

Voters next month are simply being asked to start the process moving on this issue; the details to be worked out in the next legislative session. Properly written, that could be legislation that preserves an important value along Maine’s coast while fairly allotting the obligation to pay taxes.