Facing budget shortfalls, Mass. towns need to get creative
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The trend is also accelerating. More than 50 Massachusetts municipalities voted on overrides for 2025. Five years ago, it was 30, and in 2018, just 22. Dozens of municipalities and local school districts are fighting the same budget battle, with homeowners ultimately asked to pick up the slack.
Municipalities should rely on more than just property tax hikes to balance their budgets, though. They should trim spending to the extent possible, including by regionalizing services like schools, emergency response, and public health, which might be cheaper to share with other communities. They should welcome new development that grows their tax base. Meanwhile, state lawmakers can help by giving municipalities more leeway to diversify their revenue streams so that they're not so completely at the mercy of property taxes and override votes.
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That's especially true because the pressures on municipal budgets show no sign of abating. Education costs, especially for special ed and transportation, are projected to keep rising. Wages, health insurance, and utilities are also on the upswing. 'You start to add up all those things, and it's slowly crushing the budgets,' Adam Chapdelaine, the executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which represents city and town officials on Beacon Hill, said.
Towns cannot simply pass increases of that magnitude on to taxpayers, because of Prop 2 ½, a 1980 referendum that overhauled and placed limits on local taxation. It requires municipalities to seek voter approval if they want to raise property taxes past the limits spelled out in the law.
The measure was meant to act as a check on local overspending, and it has succeeded in that sense. But any time that inflation rises above prescribed tax limits, costs outgrow municipalities' abilities to raise revenue. Big budget lines, like local school districts, are the first to feel the squeeze.
'Having any revenue structure solely based on one type of revenue leads to potentially challenging outcomes when something affects that stream,' Doug Howgate, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, said.
Especially in places where 2 ½ overrides fail or are not politically palatable, municipalities need to get creative.
There are a few possible short-term relief valves. This year, the state has a $1.3 billion surplus from the 'millionaires tax' to be split between schools and transportation. The Massachusetts House and Senate are hashing out the breakdown of this money in the coming weeks, but schools should expect a sizable chunk.
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In the long term, the rise in overrides should reopen urgent discussions about efficiency among the Commonwealth's splintered public school districts — which can only be meaningfully addressed through regionalization and cost-sharing campaigns. State initiatives like the Efficiency and Regionalization grant program, which helps municipalities with the one-time costs of consolidating school districts and other services, deserves more serious state funding. Current municipal grant allocations are capped at $200,000, limiting the program's scope.
Municipalities should also be allowed to spread the tax burden. Governor Maura Healey refiled a bill this January allowing cities and towns to increase taxes on restaurant meals and motor vehicle excise fees, as well as hotel, motel, and rental stays. Local elected leaders have endorsed these proposals, and while the motor vehicle excise fee provision strikes us as unreasonable, more municipal authority to hike hotel and meal taxes would help them plug budget holes without raising property taxes.
Ultimately, none of these measures will be able to fully mitigate the inevitable budget strain that will be on display during this year's town meetings. What they can offer is some flexibility in who shoulders the burden.
'Disruptive things are hard. Disruptive things are harder when there's nothing to make it go down easier,' Howgate said. 'There's no spoonful of sugar in a lot of this stuff.'
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