AUGUSTA, Maine - Patricia Sutherland drove for four hours to make the Thursday afternoon meeting with legislative leaders. Sutherland chairs the board of selectmen for the town of Chapman, which borders Presque Isle in northern Maine.
She came to the state Capitol to voice concerns about Gov. Paul LePage's proposal to move toward elimination of municipal revenue sharing.
The meeting with legislative leaders was called by municipal officials who say they are worried about a provision in the governor's budget proposal. It flat funds municipal revenue sharing in the first half of the two-year cycle, but eliminates it in the second.
Municipal officials say the funding cut would mean property tax increases for local residents in hundreds of communities that have few options.
"A lot of us do not have anything to tax except people," says Sutherland, who is also a member of the Maine Municipal Association's executive committee. She says she and other small town officials struggle to hold the line on property taxes now, under current state reimbursements. A budget with no property tax would leave her town with no choice but a tax increase.
"We don't have any industry, we don't have any nonprofits, hospitals or schools," Sutherland says. "We just have these folks who want to pay an affordable property tax - if there is such a thing,"
Steve Bunker, a Farmington selectman, urged lawmakers to be aware of what the budget proposal might mean for the cities and towns.
"There's many implications to our current and our ongoing relationship," Bunker said. "A lot of these implications have some real bright potential, but also consequences to consider."
Some of those consequences in LePage's budget include the elimination of $60 million in revenue sharing funds in year two, and a reformulation of the state's share of General Assistance to the poor that would have the effect of providing a few hundred dollars more to some of the smaller towns while cutting thousands and thousands of dollars from large service center communities, such as Bangor, Lewiston and Portland.
Then there's the administration's attempt to soften the blow to municipalities for lost revenue sharing by taxing non-profits. The idea would be to allow cities and towns to tax half of the valuation of non-profit agencies with property assessments higher than $500,000.
State Sen. Paul Davis, a Sangerville Republican, says that plan would appear to create a system of winners and losers. Small communities with few, if any, non-profits would get the short end of the stick.
"I have one town that has a lot of non-profits and I have about 20 towns that don't have any - they're going to lose all of their revenue sharing and gain nothing," Davis says. "That's going to be troubling."
"Revenue sharing is a program that has existed since the early 1970's, and it's a program that fairly distributes money to municipalities," says Rep. Adam Goode, a Bangor Democrat who serves as co-chair of the Legislature's Taxation Committee.
Goode says communities are having a difficult time trying to rationalize why they should be penalized with cutbacks in General Assistance and revenue sharing funds. To that end, members of the Maine Municipal Association's executive committee say they will continue to send a strong message to legislative leaders.