PORTLAND, Maine - Gov. Paul LePage's proposal to make non-profits in Maine pay property taxes is, not surprisingly, strongly opposed by museums and other cultural organizations.
In a statement released this week, the Association of Maine Archives and Museums complains that LePage's budget plan would create a significant new financial burden for the state's historical institutions.
At the headquarters of the Maine Historical Society in downtown Portland, director Steve Bromage offers a tour. The Brown Research Library, he explains, houses 875,000 volumes and more than two million pages of manuscript. It is, he says, the largest and most comprehensive collection of Maine historical archives anywhere.
"We have everything from government papers and records," Bromage says. "We have the records of businesses like the Portland Company, lots of family papers and records, genealogical records."
The library, which is more than 100 years old, is one of the three buildings that make up the organization's one-acre campus. Next door is the 230-year-old Wadsworth Longfellow House and Garden, and next to that is the Maine Historical Society's own museum, complete with with administrative offices and a shop.
The combined value of all of the society's properties in Portland totals about $5 million, and none if it is taxed. But that could change, if Gov. LePage has his way. LePage wants to eliminate state revenue-sharing for municipalities, which, in exchange, would be allowed to tax non-profits on properties worth more than $500,000, at 50 percent of their value.
Bromage says this would take a significant chunk out of the Maine Historical Society's $1.8 million operating budget. "Our initial assessment is it looks like it would be in the $45,000 to $50,000 range," he says. "So for us, that $45,000 to $50,000 - that's a position, a position-and-a-half, we would likely have to cut. That means reducing our services somewhere along the line."
Bromage says there is good reason that non-profits like the Maine Historical Society have been exempt from property taxes in Maine. "Well, I think that the fact is, we are set up to provide to services to the state of Maine, to the people of the state of Maine, our community, that the government does not provide for," he says. "I think you know this gets to social and what we believe is important. In our case, we're about history and preserving the heritage and the record of Maine."
"It's kind of feeding this notion that non-profits are not there as a service to the public," says Erin Bishop. Bishop is the director of the Association of Maine Archives and Museums, or MAM. She says the association's 300 members employ some 600 Mainers, spend about $26 million annually on goods and services, and serve more than 2-and-a-half million visitors each year.
But Bishop says they operate on very tight margins. And museums, in particular, would be hit hard if required to pay property taxes, as many of them occupy valuable properties that do not generate a lot of income.
"In fact, the reason a lot of them were formed was to restore or preserve a historic property, be it a house or a fort or a school house or a church, or a lighthouse or something of that nature," Bishop says.
Meaning many of them exceed the $500,000 threshold that LePage has established in his proposed budget. "So if you're operating on a very small, shoestring budget, and you're actually cash poor but property rich, this is definitely is going to have a negative impact on your bottom line if you're suddenly required to pay taxes," Bishop says.
The Pejepscot Historical Society, for example, which runs three historical properties in Brunswick, including the Joshua Chamberlain museum, has an operating budget of $200,000.
Director Jennifer Blanchard estimates the combined properties are worth about $700,000 - making them eligible for taxation under Gov. LePage's budget. "I don't know if we would be able to keep all properties going. That would be something that would be very much a question," Blanchard says.
The governor's office did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Meanwhile, Republican support for taxing non-profits has been muted, with many GOP lawmakers saying they need to to see more details of the proposal.