Property Tax Talk – Part II

On this edition of the podcast, Rebecca Lambert and Amanda Campbell are joined by Kathleen Billings, Stonington’s renowned town manager, a dedicated member of MMA’s Legislative Policy Committee, and one of three municipal appointees serving on the Real Estate Property Tax Relief Tax Force. Kathleen brings a strong coastal community perspective to the discussion.  From the rise in second-home ownership and the dwindling availability of year-round housing, to inflationary pressures driving up the cost of providing essential public services and the ongoing struggle to recruit and retain public safety personnel and other municipal employees, Kathleen is on the front lines of it all.  Motivated to find thoughtful solutions, Kathleen would “rather try to do something and fail, than nothing at all.” 

Transcript

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 Welcome everyone to Potholes and Politics, Local Maine Issues from A to Z. I'm your co-host Rebecca Lambert, and with me as always is my amazing colleague, Amanda Campbell. 

Hello, Rebecca. Thanks everybody for listening. 

Thank you. Janet Kelle was on our last episode of Potholes & Politics, and she is MMA's Human Resources Director.

That conversation highlighted the HR services that MMA provides to its members, both those included with the membership and other fee-based services that we provide. She's a wealth of information for all things HR and MMA is really lucky to have her on board. 

Go back and listen if you haven't already, and also please like and subscribe to our podcast on whatever platform you listen to us on. By doing that, you'll get notified when a new episode drops and you'll never miss an episode. Plus, it makes us look good. So please, please help us look good. 

Also, we would like to take a moment to thank everyone who attended MMA'S Annual Convention this year. It was held in Bangor on October 8th and 9th. Attendance was at record high this year as we celebrated our 89th annual convention, and it was a great event full of education and networking opportunities, and a chance to have a little fun with our members. So, thank you to all of our members who attended and made this year's convention a success.

Convention is always a fun time for us as staff to meet with our members, so thanks for everybody who was able to join us. This week on the podcast, we're gonna revisit the real estate property tax task force, who just held their second meeting on Tuesday, September 30th. And we are welcoming Kathleen Billings, who is the Town Manager of the Town of Stonington.

She was appointed to the task force by the governor to represent communities with populations of less than 10,000 residents. Kathleen also serves on MMA’s Legislative Policy Committee, which guides the association's advocacy efforts. Welcome Kathleen, and thanks so much for joining us. Can you introduce yourself to our members a little bit?

Sure. I've been Town Manager for Stonington. I was the first woman town manager. At least they told me when they gave me the job in 2007. Before that I was, five or six years before that I was the town clerk. And you know, just before I got the job, I was sort of like the assistant town manager.

So, it was sort of like a natural gravitation into the position, 'cause some of it I had been doing. And also to the select board. I think they wanted somebody more grounded within the community and stuff, perhaps more from, somebody from away. Because it just, you know, it's a different place down here and you have to work with a lot of different groups and stuff.

So, being here, being part of the community. My family goes back a long way, so I think that helps quite a bit, make, you know, the job a little bit easier. 

And Stonington is a beautiful place. I just had the opportunity to go there for a “Where in Maine” article and it was fantastic. I enjoyed my time there.

So, one of the duties of the task force is to discuss tax relief options for long-term property owners. We all know from the news that some Mainers are facing life-changing decisions because they can no longer afford their property taxes. This is an issue that hits close to home in your community. Can you talk a little about that, Kathleen?

Yeah, I mean this is really starting to, you know, for myself personally, you know, emotionally pain myself because, it's a really difficult in these coastal communities and Stonington, you know, is not the only community. We face housing challenges here, a lot of seasonal homes, you know. We had gotten some data from the state saying Maine was like one of the number ones, for like 50% of the homes are seasonal. And of course, when you're looking at property tax and you know how that gets passed on to people, everyone is supposed to be treated equally. The only problem is, is for us, that, there's some people who can afford taxes and there's some people who can't.

And with us, we're having frustrations within our own rise in budgets between inflation, trying to be competitive, you know, with pay not to lose staff, inflation just trying to buy, you know, whether it's plow trucks or the rest of it. It makes it extremely difficult and really hard for our select board also too, you know, to bring forth a good budget. And, try to figure out how we keep the people who are working here and essential workers and many of the jobs, but also too, the challenges because our housing opportunities are just vaporizing away from us. So, it's a, it's a huge problem for us it really truly is now.

At the meeting, on the 30th, Kathleen, there were several presentations from, us, the Association, MMA presented. And, we had some assessing information provided, as well as the Somerset County administrator and a gentleman from the state who is the fiscal administrator for the UT or the unorganized territories.

Did anything from those presentations surprise you or did you learn anything that you didn't already know about property taxes in any of those presentations? 

I was really pleased with the thoroughness of their presentations.

And yes, I did not realize, like with the unorganized territories, the gentleman who did that, you know, how much of these territories there are and how much oversight, you had to do. I think it's been kind of also too, interesting to see, perhaps you know how disadvantaged they are. Compared to other towns and cities, certainly they were not getting some of the revenues that perhaps the rest of us were. And, uh, you know, that, I think that, that's probably a, a challenge for those ones trying to manage it. I think there's also problems, also too, with the revaluations.

You know, they're facing some of the same changes that we see also too with housing and property and development and those challenges of, who lives here all the time and who is seasonal and how do you balance that out, you know, where is that middle road? And for Tim Curtis that did the, uh, county presentation, I thought he explained it extremely well.

That, even though the county is maybe not represented on the task force, I think that with his presentation it does bring us into some sort of balance and consideration of what they face. The way he described it as the, the counties, what their roles are. And also too, you know, their main function is, is public safety, for the counties, you know, in the state of Maine. And also, too the challenges that they’re facing and I mean, state police has kind of pulled back from some of their patrols and, you know, we face picking up more of those expenses with our county tax dollars. Also too, the challenges, you know, with the jails and stuff, having to pick up more of the medical and you know, other costs associated with it. And, I thought that, uh, you know, he did a good job saying that, you know, sometimes people are down and out and at their worst and, but the county jails have to pick up those costs and then they directly go on to, the taxpayers of each one of those counties.

So, you know, when towns like mine, I try to put together the municipal budgets. We're trying to stay somewhere within, you know, two or 3% or flat, or whatever the case may be. Counties, they're having their challenges now, and then, also the schools are on top of that, so it makes it difficult.

It was really interesting to me to hear the gentleman from the state refer to the unorganized territory as Maine's largest municipality and the correlation that, you know, each municipality has their own manager or administrator. They have their assessors, they have their public safety, they have all of those services within the towns and in the case of the UT, it's the state who is their town manager, their assessor, their public safety, their education, it's everything. And just the amount of acres across the state that comprise the UT and how it, the calculations are just so very different, um, than what they are for the municipalities. It was, I learned a lot as well. So it was, it was a really very, very interesting presentation. 

Well, and also too, I mean, you know, you're probably articulating it better than what I am Amanda. But the other part of it is, is you realize, like with the unorganized territories, they really don't have an advocate for themselves. And with the state overseeing it, I get why that process is there. But you know, it seems like that could be a terrible conflict of times. So, they don't have anyone like, you know, we have the LPC with our towns and cities and stuff and associations and, those poor folks don't have anybody. 

Very true.

So, what are you looking forward to at the next meeting, and do you have any final thoughts that you'd wanna share with our listeners? 

Well, I mean, it's a good committee and I really appreciate all the different outlooks that everybody has, their experiences and as well as former legislators or current legislators.

I think that it's nice that they're willing to just sort of re-look at this process again. And I think that, at times, they have been saying, all right, we have so much of a pie that we can look at with property taxes. You know, what is that pie looking like now? Does it get sliced differently?

Are there things that, you know, we're maybe not considering, with this process. And it's gonna be a challenge, there's no doubt about it, because nobody wants to pay any more taxes than what they have to. But unfortunately. You know, I look at it from our town. I mean, we have to operate on something.

Same thing with the counties have to operate. You know, we have the schools. I mean, for our town, we pay most of the schools. We don't get the 55% education subsidies. So, you know, that's a challenge for us. So, I mean, looking at that pie and figuring out how can we do a better job? How can we look at different formulas?

Can we look at how property is valued, with this to help with that? It's gonna be an interesting process to me to figure out how we can do that. And everyone, you know, sort of got a, I I was kind of like a middle of the road approach. I don't like things too sharp, one way too sharp the other because you have to put some thought into it and, clearly, this is a process that's gonna have to have that.

It's a very layered issue.

It is and uh, you know, somebody said it very well at the last meeting is that everything is interconnected with everything else. And when you talk about one issue, you're gonna have effects on the other. And I know here, in my job, I really try to put some thought into, okay, I may want to see something, but who else do I affect?

Does that help, you know, Stonington overall. And I think as a task force, we're gonna have to look at, is this gonna help Maine? Is this going to help us push forward with a, a better or a different path, for this. And I think, one of the other things is too, is not a lot of people wanna step up to doing these processes, but I think for Maine, we really need to think about this process because so much has changed in the last five or 10 years. 

And we have to re-look at how that pie is, or what is it that we have to do? Is it that we can do, you know, slice that pie differently? Or what aren't we considering? Because, Maine is, has faced more changes than they have, in the past, the COVID, you know, change on everything the way properties got sold. So, I don't know. I mean, it's just, um, it, it is really profound and, and it's come, gentrification, especially down here, is coming at a way faster pace than anyone had anticipated.

So it's kind of where I'm at with, my thought process or what I'm experiencing. 

At the first meeting, Kathleen, I wrote down a quote of something that you said when the committee members were introducing themselves. And I think it's just really a really great summary of how the task force can be thinking about their job, with this review.

And you said quote, “I'd rather try to do something and fail than do nothing at all”. End quote. 

That's true. It's true. And I mean, my position down here, is much the same. I mean, I've been pretty lucky because I got a really good board and a lot of good people that I work for. But the taxation thing has become so bone crushing to a lot of people.

And, certainly within my own community, because I have to keep people here. I have to keep our volunteers for our fire department, you know, our ambulance people. We've got a good base of volunteers, but everybody is facing the same challenges.

We don't have the carpenters. I've been, you know, just really having it hard to try to get a finance person, replacing clerks and stuff. We have a, a lot of people who are retirement age and unfortunately, we don't have a lot of young people here and uh, you know, we've been trying to work hard to strategize with the school now, you know, how can we keep people here?

How can we beef up the industrial arts or some of the other programs to have people going into the shipyard, keep people fishing and stuff like that? Fishing, lobster fishing is our, is a huge economic driver in this community and we don't have anything else really to replace it with. We're a natural resource-based economy and tourism doesn't exactly do it.

I mean, you need year-round jobs and not just what's maybe 8, 10, 12 weeks 'cause the rest of the time we just starve. So, and that's just not a good, sustainable way to be, just my opinion. 

Yeah. 

Absolutely not. 

We'll post the link to the task force meeting in the transcript for our listeners. I attended the meeting in person and the presentations that I saw were very informative and they garnered some great questions from the task force members.

Shout out to you, Amanda. Your thoughtful and well-informed presentation, you really made MMA proud. 

Well, thank you, Rebecca. That's very kind. I’m a self-proclaimed tax nerd, so it didn't feel like work really. Also, for our listeners, if you're interested in receiving our tax task force email updates and haven't already signed up, we will put Laura's email in the transcript as well, and you can request to be added to the list.

I send out a summary after every meeting that covers the highlights and provides links to all of the meeting information that was covered. 

Kathleen, I know we at MMA enjoy having you on our LPC and love that you share your opinion so freely with us. Likewise, it was great to have you join us for this episode of Potholes and Politics and thank you so much for your willingness to serve on the task force. We really appreciate you. 

No thank you guys very much. I mean, it's been enjoyable to do this and hopefully we can make some, uh, good inroads to making this whole process better for everybody.

Let's hope so. 

Great summary. 

Absolutely. 

Thanks a lot, Kathleen. 

There we are then. Then we are then. 

Sign up for our Real Estate Property Tax Relief Task Force email updates by contacting Laura Ellis at lellis@memun.org 

Watch the September 30th meeting of the task force at this link: https://legislature.maine.gov/real-estate-property-tax-relief-task-force 

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