Wringing Out 2007: Farmers in the Way.
By Jim Conley • Dec 26th, 2007 • Email This Post to a Friend •
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Next year, as the Brookline Selectmen ask you for an additional $8 million in property tax revenue (to bail them out from their fiscal mismanagement), remember their attempts to renegotiate a contract with the Brookline Farmer’s Market. I mean, how can a town government that can’t accurately calculate lost revenue from a parking lot be trusted with millions more in taxpayer funds?
One of the most successful marts in the country means nothing to our town hall team when it comes to squeezing those who can’t pay.
In July, the town’s chief engineer informed organizer’s that a new fee to set up on town property was in the works. According to the engineer, the town was losing $14 thousand in parking lot revenue during the Market’s selling season. Turns out, that calculation was wrong, the town would only earn a bit more than $3,400 (an $11 thousand difference) were it not for the the growers selling carrots in the parking spaces. (This then led many to ask why the market was being charged a fee in the first place…most communities give the space away.)
This, folks, is the work of an economic development function in Brookline that can’t see the success of a farmer’s market for want of a big box hotel or convention facility at the site which hosts the market.
The growers are well in the sights of the town’s developers (business interests and town government) and we’re likely to see more news on the Brookline Farmer’s Market in 2008.
Jim Conley is publisher of On Brookline.
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Gee, with the Town’s recently adopted PILOT Policy for non-profits to “voluntarily” pay up to 25% of assessed value in lieu of property taxes, can we expect Brookline’s Senior Center to help solve the shortfall that may call for an override? The Brookline Arts Center, which directly contributes to Brookline’s children, has apparently agreed to a PILOT agreement with the Town. But children don’t vote; seniors do.
It is amazing what kind of people the town trusts to make important financial decisions.
One of the members of the Housing Advisory Board, who oversees the affordable housing trust fund, got “free” water for years because she didn’t notice that the town wasn’t charging her for water. And she is a real estate professional! Or so they say.
Hey, isn’t the department that forgot to send her bills the same department that the FBI is investigating for fraud?
I give them all the benefit of the doubt and assume for now that they are just incompetent. Incompetent … and responsible for a multi-million dollar town fund.
What is even more troubling than their miscalculations is their utter lack of vision. They say they are concerned with economic development, but they aren’t considering what it is that underpins Brooklines’ prosperity to date or what will sustain it into the future.
Ask yourself what makes a community a desirable place to live, raise a family or start a business? What will keep the demand for property in Brookline high? It’s not another hotel, I can promise you that. It’s precisely those programs and amenities that the short-sighted money grubbing Economic Development boosters (Whose friends stand to make a killing by the new hotel, etc) fail to support. The irony here is that the Farmer’s Markets and the non-profits such as the Brookline Arts Center and Senior Center, etc. actually bring people to Brookline, make it a place many want to live and therefore bring long-term economic benefits that will far exceed a short lived cash infusion from a building that brings no real social benefits to our community. Young professionals are seeking communities that support a well rounded life-style, one that goes beyond a job and mass consumerism, and they can choose from thousands of communities. We have something different and special here, but we are quickly squandering it and are in danger of resembling all the other non-places in America, filled with parking lots and shopping malls.
On an even more simplistic level don’t the engineers at town hall remember anything from their econ classes in college? Don’t they remember the multiplier effect? All those crowds at the Farmer’s Market don’t just buy fruit and veggies. Like reasonable people everywhere, they make other purchases at neighboring stores while they are there….