Conveyance Tax Increase

Will Hurt, Or Will It?

To the Editor:

I have heard it said on more than one occasion that increasing the municipal conveyance tax, should we be successful in getting the state to give us permission to do so, will do great financial harm to our older citizens and/or others who need every penny they can get from the sale of their homes to live on. Let me point out that such a scary opinion is based on a few assumptions that beg a closer look.

First is that our town’s full swing conversion from a once quiet rural New England community to a population saturated, suburban sprawl of subdivisions in the Boston to New York “corridor,” coupled with the relentless increases in our property taxes, has not convinced these folks to move on long before they are faced with such serious financial need. In the case of such need, another assumption is that all other avenues of assistance have been exhausted, so now the house must be sold. There is no doubt that this would be a sad, if not heartbreaking, situation. But, a third assumption would have us believe that collecting a municipal conveyance tax of no more than $15 per thousand dollars of the “sale” price of real estate and designating these funds for open space and public lands acquisition, improvement, and maintenance, will somehow slow (or at best maintain) the current rate of real estate price appreciation, so that the town is taking more tax dollars from the same or smaller number of transaction dollars as there would have been without the increased funding for such an open space/public land program. This is not necessarily so.

A well run, properly funded, proactive program of open space protection and public land acquisition, improvement, and maintenance can accelerate the appreciation of land values, thereby providing more, not less, dollars to those who choose to sell, whether in serious financial straights or not.

Let’s understand what creates any communities’ property value. In a word it is “desire.” There is no question that people desire to live in Newtown and are willing to pay good money to fulfill that desire. There is no question that significant elements of the desire to live here can be found in our excellent schools and the “country” (open space) façade that the 11,000 acres of yet undeveloped land present. The questions are simply how do we maintain this level of desire and how will we pay for it without ending up in serious financial trouble ourselves.

No matter where you are on this question, make sure you get to vote.

David E. Brown

Third District

Legislative Council

246 Hattertown Road, Newtown                          September 21, 2004