Tax cap backers prepare for campaign battle

He thinks she’s “political poison.”

She thinks he’s “rude and crude.”

But when it comes to passing a 1 percent property tax cap in Maine, Portland businessman Eric Cianchette and Topsham tax reformer Carol Palesky have found themselves – like it or not – working toward the same goal.

“I gave [Palesky] a choice … that I would get involved, but I’d have nothing to do with her,” Cianchette said, a reference to Palesky’s past legal problems, including a jail term for falsifying petition signatures in a previous attempt to place her tax cap initiative on the ballot. “She’s political poison and I’m not going to get involved in that.”

Palesky, successful this time in her quest for ballot status, is almost as wary about her nonpartnership with Cianchette’s Tax Cap Yes!, a group that includes former state Sen. Phil Harriman of Yarmouth.

“[Cianchette] is pretty rude and crude … but as long as he does what he said he’ll do,” Palesky said after learning of Cianchette’s comments, made at a meeting Tuesday with the editorial board of the Bangor Daily News.

According to Palesky, what Cianchette has promised is money to wage an all-important television advertising campaign in the six weeks leading up to Nov. 2 to convince voters to support the California-style cap.

Cianchette and Harriman said Tuesday they have raised about $200,000 thus far and are beginning their summer fund-raising drive.

Palesky’s plan, modeled after California’s Proposition 13, would limit property taxes to 1 percent of a property’s value in 1997. For instance, the owner of a home valued at $120,000 that year would pay $1,200 in property taxes.

It also would limit the increase in a property’s value to 2 percent per year as long as a family member retains ownership. The limits are designed to provide predictable property tax bills in a state that ranks near the top in total tax burden, supporters say.

The apparent rift between Tax Cap Yes! and Palesky’s Maine Taxpayer Action Network is small compared to the divide between those favoring the cap and the host of state and local officials opposed.

Municipal leaders say the cap will decimate local budgets and force them to eliminate services. Most often mentioned are the politically sacred after-school activities and police protection.

Most vocal among the cap’s detractors are members of the Maine Education Association and the Maine Municipal Association, the latter of which has devoted much of its Web site to the plan under the daunting heading, “The Palesky Proposal: The Danger Ahead.”

But a statewide poll set for release today suggests that voters – about half of those surveyed, anyway – are still smitten with the idea. While not made public yet, the results are reportedly similar to a March poll, which found about 50 percent in favor of the plan, 32 percent opposed and 18 percent undecided.

Among those supporting the cap is Dick Martin of Southwest Harbor. The retired Coast Guard engineer said Tuesday those who predict the tax cap will result in disaster were, at best, exaggerating.

“Last time I checked, California was still there,” he said.

Jim Melcher, a University of Maine at Farmington political analyst, said the early support for the plan could wane as its detractors begin their campaign in earnest.

“They haven’t even started yet,” Melcher said of the tax cap’s high-powered opponents, chief among them Gov. John Baldacci.

Baldacci spokesman Lee Umphrey said the governor in the next two weeks will form a bipartisan task force to study the potential impact of the Palesky cap and, in the weeks before the election, will actively campaign against it.

“He will be very proactive … in demonstrating how this meat-ax approach will decimate services,” Umphrey said, noting that recently adopted tax reforms were already designed to lower the burden on property owners. “We can’t have the Palesky initiative cut us off at the knees.”