PITTSFIELD – If Carol Palesky’s tax cap is passed in November, life as Pittsfield residents know it now will cease to exist.

Have a fire in your kitchen? You may have to pay a fee for the fire department to respond. That’s if they show up at all, since they all will be volunteers.

Need a police officer to come to your traffic accident? Be prepared to wait. Services likely will be provided by county deputies and state troopers.

Want to throw out your trash? You may have to truck it, or pay a premium fee to have it trucked, to Norridgewock or Hermon.

There will be no library to serve your educational needs, no community theater to take your children to, no recreation or swimming lessons. If you want to register your car or renew your fishing license, be prepared: You may have to drive to Bangor or Augusta. The same goes for plumbing permits, building permits and copies of death and birth certificates.

And that is just the beginning. After Pittsfield runs out of the money it’s managed to bank, no services will be offered for the last four months of the year.

The Palesky tax cap “tries to solve the results of an issue, not its source,” Town Manager Kathryn Ruth said Friday. “The sources are continued state spending and inequities in the system.”

For Pittsfield, the best-case scenario would be a loss of $2.1 million in revenue.

The town’s current tax rate is $24.80 per $1,000 valuation, which would be forced under the tax cap provisions to be reduced to $10 per $1,000 valuation.

The effect wouldn’t just be a trimming back of how many Christmas decorations the town crew installs, said officials.

“The town would be inoperable,” Ruth said. “Basically, with our tax rate being cut more than in half, there would be drastic cuts to town services.”

Any services remaining may be subject to new and higher fees, fees that could eat up any savings homeowners see in their tax commitments.

“Police protection, theater, library, recreation – they would all be gone,” Ruth said.

Pittsfield councilors now are debating a strategy to deal with the cap if it should be enacted.

“We are a service center community,” Ruth said, referring to Pittsfield as the hub of several bordering small towns. “The frustrating thing is that some towns with huge valuations will see no effect while others will be devastated.

“It certainly isn’t fair and equitable.”

The town’s combined school, municipal and county budget for 2003 was $5,825,370. Under Palesky’s plan, only $1,538,253 would be raised in property taxes.

Adding other revenue sources, “we could then only afford $3,402,511 in services,” Ruth said.

Once the county and school payments are made, “the town would only have $423,189 to run all operations that [now] cost $2.8 million,” the town manager continued. “That’s about 15 percent of the budget, not including debt service.”

“Every service would be cut,” she said. “This town would cease to exist as it does now.”

Ruth estimated that if the town were to dip into its unappropriated surplus to fund the budget, it could continue providing some services, such as road repair and police, for about eight months.

“And then we’d run out of money,” she said.