To the Editor:
Imagine two similar Vineyard homes, one on either side of the Oak Bluffs/Edgartown boundary — each assessed at $1 million. The Edgartown homeowner’s annual property tax is about $3,030, while the tax on the Oak Bluffs home is $6,790. That’s because Edgartown’s tax rate is $3.03, while the residential rate in Oak Bluffs is $6.79.
Edgartown enjoys a taxable real estate base so huge — more than $10 billion (yes, with a B) versus $3.6 billion in Oak Bluffs — that it drives the tax rate down. Drill down into those town tax rates, however, and you’ll find something that’s truly unfair to our two imaginary homeowners:
The portion of taxes that our imaginary Edgartown homeowner pays to the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School is about $510. The high school tax that the Oak Bluffs homeowner must pay is about $1,620 — more than three times as much.
If that strikes you as perhaps unfair, consider this: The owner of a Chilmark property valued at $1 million (if you can imagine a Chilmark parcel that cheap) pays only about $290 to support the regional high school. The Oak Bluffs homeowner is shelling out more than five times that figure, year after year.
The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School is the only regional agency on the Island that charges different property owners different tax rates, depending upon where they live.
The elementary schools of Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Tisbury apply the same tax rate to every dollar’s worth of property in town, from their grandest mansions — summer estates that will never be home to a public school student — to their humblest year-round family residences. No one in any Island town is going street to street, hunting where the elementary schoolchildren live, and charging a higher tax rate to those neighborhoods.
But this is precisely how the town assessments of the regional high school are structured — based not on real estate value, but on an annual head count of where the kids are. It’s an indefensibly, lopsidedly inequitable arrangement.
A regional institution, if it’s to be funded by property taxes, needs a single regional tax rate that applies consistently across the whole community it serves. The Martha’s Vineyard Commission is a perfect example of this. With its $2 million operating budget, the MVC raises the money it needs with assessments that extract about five cents per $1,000 of real estate value across the Island. Wherever you own property, from Aquinnah to Chappaquiddick, and even on Gosnold, you’re paying that same nickel for every thousand in real estate to fund our regional land use planning agency.
By contrast, the high school tax in each town varies across a shockingly wide range: from $1.68 in Tisbury to a paltry 29 cents in Chilmark (which, remember, already enjoys the second-lowest tax rate of all 351 towns in the commonwealth).
Oak Bluffs, Tisbury and West Tisbury, with less than half of the Island’s real estate value, are forced under the current formula to pay more than two-thirds of the regional high school’s costs each year. Chilmark, Edgartown, and Aquinnah enjoy a high school funding formula that benefits them at the expense of their neighbors — and to date their approach has been to avoid the conversation rather than try to defend the indefensible. The question framed by the current formula is whether we’re able to rise above the perspective that pits my town against yours and, instead, begin to see the Island whole.
Nis Kildegaard
Edgartown