How to balance Bangor taxes, spending?

The Bangor City Council is trying to figure out how to allocate your tax dollars for the fiscal year that begins July 1. How much money are you willing to send to the city without undue resentment and what do you expect in return in the way of services?

We are in the last week of budget negotiations and none of the options before us is appealing. We do not have enough money. We are facing the prospect of painfully cutting good programs or painfully allowing taxes to rise.

Our budget process has been long and careful, extending at least four months, with presentations by the city staff about the needs of Bangor – its schools, roads and sidewalks, and the myriad of small infrastructure details that make up a modern city. Bangor’s public servants are careful and their demands on the public purse moderate.

We have also heard from many citizens groups about special – and wonderful – projects that they feel warrant city support: the library, folk festival, July 4 celebration, soccer fields, environmental and historic preservation and many other projects that give life in Bangor its special quality. They too are passionate and persuasive. Their requests for public funds are compelling; city monies have been used as leverage and to great advantage many times to promote the public good.

But the tax base that supports all these endeavors is changing. There has been a marked worldwide increase in the value of residential (as opposed to commercial and industrial) property over the past five years. This phenomenon is bedeviling Europe, Asia and the rest of the United States as well as us here in Bangor. Why this has occurred is unclear. Some economists refer to it as a “bubble” that, like other economic excesses, will eventually correct itself. But for the present the tax burden (which by law relates to actual market value) is shifting to residential property owners and away from commercial and industrial base. Homeowners are angry.

Tax-cap referendums, such as Proposition 13 in California or the pending Palesky referendum in Maine, reflect this anger. Residential taxes are going to rise for a significant number of individual Bangor property owners simply because their property is worth more this year than last. Homeowners probably don’t care that the overall property tax revenues are level or that taxes on commercial and industrial property will decrease. They are going to be upset not because of anything the council does to their mill rate but because of the local impact of a worldwide trend.

If voter anger prevails and a Maine tax-cap referendum passes in the November election it will have a draconian effect on municipalities and local school districts. Funding in Bangor will be cut by $22 million (out of a total budget of $71 million) and the public sector will be largely gutted.

So the council has been working toward an ambitious goal: operating the city and our schools next year on the same property tax incomes as we have this year plus taxes from new construction. We are trying to buck the worldwide trend of increasing residential property value – and at the same time undercut the tax-cap initiative by demonstrating that local government can show self-restraint. We are trying to protect Bangor residents from two extremes – that of excessive taxation and that of overreaction. The ballot box is a blunt instrument with which to adjust the tax system; you can’t fix a computer with a baseball bat.

Ours is a fine plan but unfortunately we do not control all of the variables. Local taxes will go up regardless of what we decide because of an increase in the county tax (over which we have almost no say). Because it costs more to run Bangor this year than last year (cost of living expenses, health insurance, purchase of material goods) we will have to cut nearly $850,000 from our current level of spending if we are to achieve our stated goal.

So how should we balance taxes and spending? Your city councilors are making up their minds according to their own philosophic outlooks, each interpreting their mandate from you in a slightly different way. We ponder and balance, hem and haw, assess competing needs and pressures. We certainly will not please everyone but at least our decision-making is open, transparent and televised on public access Channel 7. We will probably cut programs that some citizens care about passionately and underfund others. Ultimately, we may view the necessary cuts as too close to the center of our civic life and not achieve our goal of the same tax revenue from our current tax base.

What is absent is public discussion – your input – about the larger role that we as individuals want government to play in our public life. There is an assumption that government will do what it has always done -maintain public safety, infrastructure, education – all quietly, in the background without commandeering too many of our individual resources or creating too much of a fuss. But the dialogue that we have historically had with each other, our commitment to taking care of the whole community, has become blurred. Raised voices have taken the place of reasoned discourse. The broad push toward equality that has characterized American society at its best is being supplanted by narrowly focused, partisan interest groups with limited horizons.

Financial and tax decisions are at the core of our civic life and require ongoing citizen understanding and input. Each year we make decisions about how to tax ourselves and this

November we will vote on a tax cap; it is essential that we discuss in a public forum what kind of a Bangor we want to live in and how much we are willing to pay to live here. As a city we are seeking ways that you can have greater input. As a councilor I welcome your suggestions.

Geoff Gratwick is a member of the Bangor City Council.