Sales tax option killed by panel $15 million bond plan revived

AUGUSTA – The Legislature’s Taxation Committee on Monday put the final nail in the coffin of a languishing local option sales tax proposal, which Bangor officials had hoped could help replace the city’s aging auditorium.

But within hours of the local option’s swift demise, the House gave a new lease on life to a $15 million bond proposal – which just three days ago suffered a lopsided defeat there – to help fund a new auditorium.

The death of the local sales tax came as no surprise to even its most ardent supporters, including Rep. Joseph Perry, D-Bangor, who cited its inevitable defeat in the House as the impetus for his reluctant request to kill the bill in committee.

“It doesn’t appear that this is the year,” Perry told the committee, which voted unanimously to reject the controversial bill that would have allowed a municipality – with voter approval at a local referendum – to impose up to a 1 percent sales tax to fund a specific project.

“We’re focusing on other options,” Perry said.

The city’s most promising option this session, he said, is still a $15 million state bond, which was surprisingly resurrected Monday morning when the Senate voted to send the measure to the Appropriations Committee for consideration.

The bond, proposed by Rep. Brian Duprey, R-Hampden, suffered a contentious defeat in the House last week, with members of the Bangor delegation speaking both for and against the legislation, which would provide about half of the estimated $30 million needed to build a new auditorium.

In the wake of the Senate vote, however, the House was forced to reconsider Monday, voting 72-66 to send the bond to Appropriations, which is expected to hear the matter this afternoon.

Rep. Pat Blanchette, D-Bangor, fervently opposed the bond plan last week, saying that with no solid prospects of private funding, it would ultimately force the Bangor taxpayers to pick up the rest of the tab.

In an earlier meeting of the city’s delegation in the Senate Republican Office on Monday, Blanchette said that efforts under way to secure private and regional funding to match the state bond alleviated some of her concerns.

But at least one remained, she said.

Duprey’s bill doesn’t specifically mention Bangor as the recipient of the state money, but instead refers to “new auditorium and civic center in eastern central Maine.”

After Monday’s House passage, Duprey said the language was intentionally vague to make the proposal more palatable to voters, but stressed that Bangor has always been the intended recipient.

“Bangor’s the only community in the position to do this,” Duprey said. “This is 100 percent for Bangor, but it’s important for economic development in all of eastern Maine.”

But with or without Bangor’s name in the text, the bond’s passage is anything but certain.

If the Appropriations Committee signs off on the bond, it must win a difficult two-thirds approval from both the House and Senate before it could be placed on the statewide November ballot for voters’ consideration.

Even with the bond still alive, supporters of the local option sales tax were disappointed with its defeat.

“It’s an opportunity lost,” said State Planning Office Director Evan Richert, who led the King administration’s unprecedented support for the local sales tax, which would have been limited to five years and enacted only with voter approval at local referendum.

Richert, like Perry, blamed some of the late opposition on political rather than policy concerns. “It’s a very difficult kind of bill to bring up in an election year. … It would have been very easy to accuse someone of supporting a new tax.”