BANGOR – As the Legislature’s Taxation Committee sits down to consider a bill that would allow local governments to impose their own sales tax, a study scheduled to be released this weekend contends the new tax could pose a risk to the state’s poor.

“A 1 percent tax may not seem like that much to a lot of people,” said John Hanson, director of the University of Maine’s Bureau of Labor Education, the author of the report. “But, to a lot of people, it is.”

In the report, titled “Thinking Outside the Box: The Challenge of Maine’s Regional Service Centers,” Hanson writes that because poor families tend to spend a larger percentage of their income in sales taxes, “if a local option sales tax were adopted, low-income families may need some additional protection from its regressive effects.”

The legislation, titled the Debt Avoidance Act, would allow municipalities – with voters’ approval at a local referendum – to adopt up to a 1 percent sales tax on goods and services bought in that community. The revenue from the tax could only be used to fund regional capital projects.

The newest version of the once-spurned bill has gained some high-profile support in Augusta of late, with former critics – including Gov. Angus King – signing on to the plan, which Bangor officials see as a means of replacing its aging auditorium without asking already strapped property taxpayers to foot the $30 million bill.

Rep. Joseph Perry, D-Bangor, on Wednesday took issue with the bureau’s findings, contending instead that high property taxes – such as those in Bangor – are far more regressive, prompting an outward migration to the suburbs while leaving cities with the expensive task of maintaining their extensive infrastructures.

“You don’t have to look any further than the last census to know that regressive property taxes have played a role in Bangor’s loss of population,” said Perry, a member of the Taxation Committee. The local option sales tax “is a fair way of evening things out.”

“Basically, if you spend $100 at the mall, you’ll pay an extra buck,” Perry continued.

While untested in Maine, 32 states now have some form of local sales tax, according to the Commerce Clearinghouse Inc., an Illinois-based group that studies tax issues. Maine would become the first New England state to allow a local sales tax.

Hanson’s report cites a 1999 study from the North Carolina Budget and Tax Center, which found that an increase in local sales taxes in that state “would hit the least affluent 20 percent … about three times as hard as the most affluent 20 percent when viewed as a share of household income.”

Hanson said those figures would likely hold true for Maine, unless the state lawmakers could offset the impact through targeted tax breaks such as increasing the state’s earned income tax credit and making it refundable.

“In a lot of ways a very targeted and very limited local option tax does make a lot of sense, but it makes more sense to approach this on a regional basis,” said Hanson, whose report cites alternatives, including changes in the state’s revenue sharing formula and laws regarding tax-exempt properties.

The bill before the Taxation Committee would limit the local sales tax to five years or until the project is paid in full, whichever comes first. After the expiration of the tax, a municipality could not ask voters to approve another tax for three years.

The plan also allows a municipality to cap the local tax on big-ticket items, such as cars, at $50.

Under the proposal, 88 percent of the revenue from the local tax would return to the municipality for the capital project. About 5 percent would go into the state’s revenue sharing fund and 3.8 percent to regional economic development projects. The remainder would go toward administrative costs and promotion of local businesses.