$20M town yard unthinkable given current debt
Editor, Townsman:
Like a vampire, a plan keeps rising from the dead to build new town yard that will add tens of millions of dollars of additional debt to the town's already overloaded property-tax burden.
The Andover town-yard project has been a metaphorically half-baked idea since its inception. Now it is certifiably half-baked, given that selectmen have recently indicated they are contemplating asking residents to approve at this year's Town Meeting the spending of close to $20 million to buy a piece of property for a new town yard before additional millions in other project costs have even been identified and calculated.
It is now very clear selectmen are out of touch with the day-to-day financial realities facing residents as the selectmen continue to promote expensive new projects, even as the current crop of expensive town projects underway flounder, all of which are going to significantly increase every homeowner's tax bill. As just one example, the Bancroft Elementary School replacement project already has had its wheels fall off and come to a complete halt before ground has even been broken due to environmental issues. These delays and the newly created uncertainties of what it will take to get this project completed will increase the cost of the project by millions of dollara.
And the selectmen have yet to come clean with town residents regarding the property-tax consequences of all those contracts with bloated benefits packages that they and the School Committee approved over the years that produced the recently revealed unfunded liability that Andover has an unfunded debt of federal government proportions. This third of a billion dollars - third of a billion dollars - unfunded liability will require a homeowner annual property tax increase, sometime over the next year or so, of approximately $2,000 per year for the next 20 years to cover what each Andover homeowner owes as a cumulative result of all of these poorly conceived contracts. Cleaning up that financial mess, by itself, will immediately increase the average homeowner annual property tax bill from $8,000 per year to around $10,000 per year. And that $2,000 increase in a homeowner's annual tax bill does not include the impact on homeowner tax bills from the Bancroft School project and its cost overruns.
So before the selectmen waste more of the town's time on another expensive pet project of theirs, they need to focus on figuring out how to minimize the tax impact of the financial mess they allowed to develop on their watch and on the decisions the town needs to make now in order to keep property taxes from increasing even further. Otherwise, the annual tax bill on even a small, modest home in Andover will keep out all but the 1 percent.
Bob Pokress
3 Cherrywood Circle
