By Fred Wallace, Member
Community Preservation Act Study Group
& City Historian
February 24, 2020
Every community in the Commonwealth faces the challenge of producing an annual budget that provides for its current needs while holding the line on taxes as much as possible. These needs are essential services and include schools, public works, salaries for city workers, fire and policemen, and maintenance of city owned properties, just to name some of the major line items. At the same time, there are other needs (and opportunities) relating to community goals such as protection of open space, historic preservation, outdoor recreation (parks, and playgrounds), and community housing, that would benefit the community, but all too often have a way of being at the bottom of funding priorities every year and end up being eliminated altogether. Typically these are projects that enrich the quality of life in a community and can even have a positive impact on property values. Some would say these are not essential. I believe a majority would say they are!
Back in the year 2000, the State of Massachusetts created a process to assist communities with the funding of projects such as these. It is the Community Preservation Act (Mass. General Laws, Chapter 44B). Since the Act was approved over half of the municipalities in our state have adopted it with very favorable results. Not one community which adopted it has since withdrawn.
In November of last year, our City Council voted unanimously to appoint a committee to study this legislation and make a recommendation as to whether our city should adopt it. It is expected that this Community Preservation Act Study Group will recommend the adoption of the Act to City Council. If City Council agrees, it will then put a referendum on the ballot in November of this year for the voters to decide.
Very briefly this is how the Community Preservation Act would work: our city would put a very small surcharge on the property tax bills and those monies would go into a dedicated trust fund to be used exclusively for the four purposes mentioned above. At the same time, the State of Massachusetts puts a small surcharge on fees collected by the Registry of Deeds and those funds go into a separate dedicated trust fund. Then at the end of the fiscal year the State issues matching funds to participating cities and towns, including us! The match will vary from year to year depending on how much the State has collected. It is worth pointing out that those surcharges collected by the Registry of Deeds have applied to all transactions here in Framingham over the past twenty years and those monies have gone to other municipalities!
Additional details will be spelled out in the Study Group’s recommendations to City Council and we will share those in a later report. Also in the coming months there will be a presentation at the History Center on the “nuts and bolts” of the Community Preservation Act and the benefits it can offer Framingham. For those of us who are members of the History Center, adoption of the Community Preservation Act would mean a stream of funds for historic preservation projects… We all remember what a struggle it was to get the funding for the renovation of Village Hall. Wouldn’t this be a better way to handle projects like that in the future?