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classicrock40 t1_j0z877y wrote

I understand what you're saying. My take is that our infrastructure was built many years ago. If a town truly wanted to fund all the maintenance projects, it would keep track of the lifetime of each capital item, then assign a lifetime, then add a yearly budget item to save for it. Just like most homeowners don't do this for their roof or furnace or central air, neither do the towns. Priorities shift, tax dollars become scarce and costs rise. Would you rather fund the school budget or maybe let the roads/sidewalks go another year? what about the police/fire/etc Maybe the road/sidewalk is due to be replaced, but its a 25 year plan and the NE weather has destroyed it in 20. Lots of issues, but it always comes down to $ (taxes)

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Parallax34 t1_j0zfc8z wrote

This is correct but its actually quite a bit more complex than this. MA's CH70, state law around education funding, means a municipality is legaly required to fund schools at an amount determined by a standard equation. And Proposition 2.5 means the municipal levy (overall property taxes) can only grow by 2.5% YOY.

Services, like education costs, consistently grow far faster than 2.5% every year, but really the cost of most municipal services grow more than 2.5%/yr. Some of this can be mitigated with development, as that can add to the tax base further. But the typical effect of these state laws, in lower density suburbs particularly, is that services like roads and infrastructure must be perpetually scaled back over time as the school budget eats up a larger and larger percentage of the overall budget, or in wealthier towns they have periodic override votes, see tax increases, to mitigate this legislative inconsistency.

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classicrock40 t1_j10ka8o wrote

Agreed. When you live in a small MA town whose income is solely property taxes, whose state contributions keep going down and whose budget is mostly education (regional school district), police and snow plowing it's painfully easy to see.

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Clollin OP t1_j116gau wrote

I agree. Education, police, and snow plowing seem well funded, but not anything else.

Idk why people prefer seeing a spotless police cruiser to seeing a perfectly even sidewalk.

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