Hermon discussion focuses on tax cap

HERMON – As a gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy Reserves, Jack Wibby was instilled with the idea that the only way to do things was the right way and that doing it right sometimes meant doing drills over and over again.

And it was hard.

At 71, Wibby is again taking aim, but this time at property taxes, as a proponent for the tax cap proposal going before voters this fall.

Wibby, a retired physics teacher and Yarmouth resident, brought his determination to Hermon on Thursday night, where a 90-minute discussion was held featuring both sides of the tax cap proposal.

“I’m sick and tired of people being driven from their homes,” Wibby told about 40 people attending the forum held at Hermon High School. “I’m not going to put up with it.”

Tax cap opponent Rob Brown concurred with Wibby that there is a problem, but that’s where their agreement ended.

“Something has to be done but what we don’t have to do is [dismantle] our towns in the process,” said Brown, who represents the Maine Citizen Leadership Fund, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy organization known for its involvement in fighting for clean elections and lower-cost prescriptions in Maine.

The so-called Palesky proposal would cap property taxes at $10 per $1,000 of assessed value, based on the values of 1996-1997. It also would limit assessment increases to 2 percent a year while the property’s ownership remains in a family.

Wibby contended that the cap would mean Maine towns and cities would have to streamline their budgets to include only necessary core services or come up with alternative funding methods for any extras local communities want.

In what he saw as a switch to greater local control, Wibby said municipalities would be deciding what they needed while residents would make their own choices, such as whether to pay a fee to use the local library or use the money for other activities or prescriptions.

Brown, meanwhile, described the tax cap proposal as the greatest transfer of authority to Augusta, saying that municipalities increasingly relying on the state for funding will find more strings and mandates attached.

“He who pays the bills gets to set the rules,” Brown said.

Brown also said the tax cap is misguided, arguing that it would take up to $1 billion from municipal coffers while more than 50 percent of those who would benefit are not the towns and cities, but corporations and out-of-state landowners.

In California, where Proposition 13 has been a way of life for more than two decades, Brown said the state has only managed to stay financially stable during economically strong times and that California lost 100,000 jobs and closed 75 libraries after the proposition went into effect.

California transplant Peggy Sheriff – who now calls Bangor home but who lived through Proposition 13 until 2001 – called those assertions nothing more than scare tactics. And she said she has seen them before.

A former aerospace worker, Sheriff said most of the jobs lost in California were because of downsizing in the aerospace industry. The mass layoffs of police officers and firefighters that opponents predicted never materialized.

“Not one police officer lost a job, not one firefighter,” said Sheriff, who is part of the Tax Cap Now! organization, which is in favor of the tax cap.

And although Sheriff now calls Maine home and doesn’t want to leave, she said she paid a tax of $1,700 on a $160,000 home in California, while in Maine the same valued home costs $4,000 a year in taxes.

With some residents already decided on where they stand, Thursday’s meeting may have been intended more for the undecided voter such as machinist Larry Davis, who is determined to make a thoughtful decision.

He said he would rather make no decision than a bad decision. Davis said he was hoping for a more moderate proposal or a happy medium could be found somewhere between the two extreme points.

Davis arrived at the meeting undecided and left the same way.