A Look at Potential Taxpayer Savings through the Community Preservation Act

This coming November voters in Whitman will have a big decision to make about adopting the Community Preservation Act. Simply put, the CPA as proposed in Whitman is a 1% surcharge on your property taxes (after exempting the first 100k in value, low income families, and medium income seniors). In Whitman the average family who is not exempt will contribute about $40 annually. I’ll go into more detail about how to calculate whether you’re exempt or how much the surcharge is in a future post. But for now I’d like to discuss one of the biggest benefits to the town of adopting the CPA.

The Commonwealth matches a percentage of all local revenue raised every year through the Community Preservation Act Trust Fund. I reviewed annual and special town meeting warrants from Fiscal Years 2017 to 2021, and identified $723,077.48* that we spent and $40,000 that we passed over which could have been funded by the Community Preservation Act. The 5 year average state match was 19.69%. That would have translated to a direct savings to taxpayers of $150,249.96*. That is money from the State that we would not have needed to raise and appropriate at Town Meeting.

My best estimate at what Whitman would have raised in Community Preservation Funds in that same 5 year stretch, including the state match, was just over $1,000,000. The 2021 number from the Community Preservation Coalition is approximately $187,000 from local revenue and $33,000 from the trust fund. I used each year’s match and an estimated 5% annual growth in local revenue from nearby towns to get $1,013,000 from Fiscal 2017 to 2021.

So looking at the full picture: adopting the CPA would have saved $150k at our last 5 town meetings, and we still would have had $250k in CPA money for recreation, open space, affordable housing, or historic preservation.

Below are the articles I identified as eligible for Community Preservation Act funds. The articles we passed over were a 10% match to be eligible for a grant to build a dog park in town and a consultant to assist in creating a 40-R district for economic development in town.

*Note: A review of some of the indoor school projects finds that they may not meet the CPA requirements as recreation. In that scenario the new project sum would be $694,131.48 and the state match would be $136,674.49

Articles presented at Whitman Town Meetings between 2017 and 2021 that could have been funded with CPA money

Estimated CPA funds for Whitman from 2017 to 2021