HOULTON – Rest assured, Mainers. Tax reform is on the way, but not in the form of the so-called Palesky tax cap.

That was one of the messages hammered home by Gov. John Baldacci on Sunday afternoon during a public forum at the Washburn municipal building. Baldacci spent the day in Aroostook County, attending a harvest festival in Eagle Lake and a participating in a supper in Fort Kent to benefit the local food pantry.

More than 40 people attended the forum, grilling the governor about everything from education to the recent formation of the state Department of Health and Human Services. State Reps. Raymond Wotton and John Martin and Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Commissioner Roland “Dan” Martin also participated in the discussion.

A large portion of the conversation focused on the tax cap referendum, which the governor urged voters to defeat.

“If this tax cap passes, it is going to bring massive cuts to education, police and fire departments and other services,” Baldacci said during the hour-long meeting. “There is not that much money in the state government to make up for all of those cuts. We need to vote down Palesky because it is an extreme approach and will cut services to small towns like Washburn.”

The cap, named after Topsham tax activist Carol Palesky, would scale back assessed property values to their 1996-97 level and cap property taxes at $10 per $1,000 of valuation if approved by voters. It also would limit assessments to an increase of 2 percent a year while a property remains in a family. One component includes a rollback of property values to 1996 levels, which state supreme court justices and the state attorney general have advised is unconstitutional.

Tax cap supporters have accused municipal officials of using scare tactics when they have warned of expansive firings and scant educational offerings should voters approve the referendum.

Baldacci said that he was going to make sure the Legislature provided tax relief to Maine residents. The governor said, “No one in the Legislature is going anywhere” next session until they come up with a solution.

“Tax reform and tax relief are going to happen,” Baldacci said.

The governor said he believed that if voters approved the tax cap, other states would gain jobs and businesses while Maine was left behind.

Some audience members expressed fear that voters would approve the tax cap simply because they were unaware of its full impact. Baldacci told the crowd that his administration is urging voters to look to a study written by economists at the University of Maine’s Margaret Chase Smith Center. The report found that if the referendum passed, state lawmakers would need to increase the state income tax 64 percent or boost the state’s 5 percent sales tax to more than 9 percent to try to fill the estimated $688 million shortfall in local budgets.

“Look at that study and see for yourselves,” Baldacci told the crowd on Sunday. “And remember that tax reform is coming. In January when the Legislature comes back in session, we will be in a better situation to do that.”

The Margaret Chase Smith Center study is available at www.

umaine.edu/mcsc/TaxCap.pdf.