To the editor:
If you believe that a municipality would never do anything to deliberately harm its citizens, stop reading this letter right now. It would be a waste of your time. However, if you are open minded enough to form your own opinion, then continue reading and consider the following facts.
In July of 2014, the Caribou Secession Committee announced that they were beginning a process of secession that would allow rural Caribou to secede from urban Caribou and to reincorporate as the Town of Lyndon. It is obvious that the size and cost of the Caribou city government is simply too great. By forming the town of Lyndon a better job of governing Caribou’s rural residents could be done for lot less money. After an exhaustive financial analysis, the secession committee determined that property taxes could be reduced by at least 28 percent, which is a collective savings of nearly $1 million a year in property taxes for the taxpayers of Lyndon.
In response to our announcement for this new taxpayer-friendly rural community, the Caribou City Council slammed on the brakes of their runaway freight train of spending! (“Let us not give those secessionists any more ammunition to use against us than they already have.”) They chose a sly maneuver in an attempt to convince taxpayers that they really didn’t have to raise taxes every year. Pretending to act like responsible managers of public funds, they “cut the fat out of their Expense Budgets” for years 2015 and 2016, as they claimed at the time. Thus they appeared to whittle away and cut expenses with a theatrical flair that would have made even old Shakespeare blush green with envy. For two budget cycles, the Mayor and the City Manager performed their two-man good cop, bad cop show for the benefit of the Caribou taxpayers. They performed their mock drama – the likes of which had never been seen before – while all of the time blatantly ignoring the desperate pleas of taxpayers for less taxation and a return to a town-meeting style of government.
Ironically, it was the City of Caribou’s very own city manager, Austin Bleess, who, when asked by the Brainerd Dispatch why he was running for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2006, replied: “Because our rural voices are not being heard at the capital. We need to bring accountability back to government, require them to use their time and money wisely to get the job done and within budget constraints, just as our families have to.” Well, well, well! What a difference 10 years makes!
But now, read on to see how the plot thickens and the cauldron of intrigue boils and bubbles! Earlier this year, the Maine Legislature, after hearing the cries for property tax relief across the state, increased the Homestead Exemption from $10,000 to $15,000 in an effort to lessen the burden of taxation that all homeowners feel at the local level. That meant that every Caribou taxpayer who was eligible to use this exemption would have seen a savings in their 2016 tax bill of $112.30 at the then mil rate of 22.46.
Finally, we were about to get some much needed tax relief! Granted, it was not much, but it was a move in the right direction.
However, our local band of municipal thieves came quietly in the night and, in a cynical act of underhanded thievery, our burgling public servants unnecessarily raised our mil rate to 22.9, effectively eliminating a significant portion of the savings that was intended by the state legislature for the property tax relief for all of the homeowners of Caribou eligible for the Homestead Exemption. Therefore, if your home is valued at $96,000 they stole 32 percent of the $112.30 Homestead Exemption. If it is worth $155,000 they stole 55 percent of it! The more the city valued your home, the more they stole. Finally, if your home is assessed at $270,000 or more, you got nothing. That’s right, baby, they took it all!
It is obvious that the city used the Maine Legislature’s Tax Relief Bill as political cover to cynically, and with great subterfuge, raise the mil rate thinking that most people would not notice because most of their tax bills would be slightly lower than the year before. Therefore, the uninformed taxpayer would not have been aware that the spirit and substance of the additional $5,000 Homestead Exemption had been gutted by municipal greed. The city fraudsters even prepared a deceptive little chart that pretends to show how the taxpayer paid less in property tax than they did the year before.
However, where does that leave all of those who own taxable property that don’t qualify for the Homestead Exemption such as apartment and commercial buildings, farmlands, woodlots and the $17 million of personal property that is taxed at the same rate as real estate? It leaves them with yet another economy-killing and completely unnecessary tax increase!
Now, here’s why they didn’t need to raise the mil rate. The combined year-over-year minimal increases of County taxes ($33,965) and Eastern Aroostook RSU taxes ($76,476) that the City of Caribou was facing, as well as any lost revenue from state reimbursements, could have easily been covered by using any one or all of the following four fiscally responsible measures to account for the revenue shortfall and added expenses:
A. They could have gone back and trimmed the $8.8 million Expense Budget across the board by a modest 1.25 percent, or
B. They could have used some of $3 million returned last year by the Maine State Retirement System. These returned millions also could have been used to immediately offset the onerous burden of Caribou’s high property value assessments by immediately lowering the mil rate or by lowering the high property valuations – or by lowering both. Instead these millions of dollars were stolen from the Caribou taxpayers last year, when the Caribou City Council made the shady and questionable decision to purchase a five-year certificate of deposit from the bank next door instead of returning some or all of those millions, in the form of tax relief, to those taxpayers who had paid out all of those returned millions, in the first place, in the form of taxes.
C. At the least, they could have used the $90,000 of interest that was earned from the $3 million to offset the minimal increases.
D. Alternatively, they also could have used the $371,299 budget surplus (lapsed appropriations) from 2015 in order to meet their fiscal obligations. By the way, where is that money?
But, our greedy-gut politicians prefer stealing more money from the taxpayer to reining in their addiction to spending taxpayer money! Raising the mil rate deters businesses from investing their equity in buildings and equipment and it encourages people, who aren’t totally trapped here by an unsellable home, to move out of Caribou. It keeps young people from moving back after college and hastens both our population and our economic decline. Every tax increase is yet one more nail in the coffin of this slowly dying city; a screw nail that is being hammered into that coffin every day by our subservient, rubber stamping public policy-makers.
Maybe somebody should report this grand theft to the Chief of Police … but wait … that won’t do any good! The City Council stole 97 percent of his tax relief too!
And to make matters worse, one of the Councilors who voted to raise our taxes and increase the size and cost of Caribou city government is running as a Republican to be your next State Senator from District One. So much for the pretentious Republican policy claim of smaller, more cost effective government with lower taxes!
Is anyone else out there paying attention to the City of Caribou’s predatory behavior toward its own tax-paying citizens and its business owners? Haven’t we already been harmed enough?
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