City showed leadership in revenue-sharing fight Thursday, March 6, 2014 LD 1762, which prevents a $40 million cut in statewide revenue sharing and provides approximately $775,000 of those funds for Sanford, is now the law of the land. The Legislature passed the bill, and, despite his misgivings, Governor Paul LePage spared the measure from his veto pen. Hear that whooshing sound? It’s the collective sigh of relief from those charged with crafting and reviewing Sanford’s budget for the coming fiscal year. We taxpayers should be relieved too; without those $750,000, we could have seen another hike in property taxes and yet another dip in services. The city is now able to proceed with a budget that essentially holds the line on taxes — just three more cents per $1,000 of valuations — and attempts to keep job-cutting to a minimum. In a letter to the editor in last week’s issue of the Sanford News, Mayor Tom Cote thanked our local legislators, Sen. John Tuttle and Reps. Andrea Boland, Anne Marie Mastraccio and William Noon, for their votes to approve LD 1762. They and their colleagues in Augusta who voted with them did the right thing. Here’s why: The state’s revenue-sharing program was created decades ago to lessen the financial burden of local property taxes on taxpayers. Legislators at the time proposed that government and education be funded from three sources — one-third from income tax, one-third from sales tax and one-third from property taxes. The revenue-sharing program dedicated five percent of the funds collected through sales taxes to be returned to municipalities to lighten the local tax burden. Augusta kept that promise for years and years, but in recent times has used the revenue-sharing fund to cover shortfalls in the state’s budget. As a result, Sanford and municipalities throughout Maine have received far fewer funds and have had to hike taxes and make drastic cuts to make ends meet. To be sure, the state still faces significant financial challenges, and Governor LePage has his own ideas as to how to address them in light of LD 1762’s passage. That said, LD 1762 ends the unfairness of recent years and helps strengthen an important subgroup of Maine’s overall building blocks — the municipalities. We join Cote in thanking our legislators, and we also applaud local leaders who fought the good fight. At the top of that list we’d put City Manager Steven Buck, who struck a proactive posture and enlisted Sanford’s citizens in the pursuit of those revenue-sharing funds. Buck and some of our elected officials traveled to Augusta, and here at home he kept the city council and residents up to speed with a few presentations. At one point, he urged residents to join the cause, telling them on live television, and in the newspaper articles that followed, “Your voice matters.” For the efforts of Buck, the mayor, city councilors and others, we are grateful. Their approach, and the success they share with everyone else in Maine who advocated for those revenue-sharing funds, helped unite Sanford and get everyone on the same page in time for the current budget season, now under way.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 12:40:46 +0000
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