When is a donation not a donation?
When you give it to a municipality.
Don't make the mistake of agreeing to what will be labeled a voluntary, good-will contribution to your community. If you do it even once, it's no longer voluntary in the eyes of elected officials. It's an obligation to be discharged year after year, in perpetuity.
If you decide you can't afford to do it again, first there will be guilt trips. You will be held responsible for some critical need suffering grievous harm — public safety or "the children" are favorites. If that doesn't work, there will be veiled threats — perhaps not so veiled — that public services might not be as readily accessible to you as they were in the past.
This week, the poster child for this scenario is Merrimack College, which straddles Andover and North Andover. But it could be almost anywhere. The conflict is over the fact that nonprofits, including higher education institutions and churches, are exempt from local property tax.
Local officials don't like that. They especially don't like it in an era when they have given away the store to public employee unions and are desperate to find enough money to pay for the gravy train. It is tougher for them to sell Proposition 21รขÑ2 overrides, since they've worn out their credibility with exhausted constituents. They've already raised fees to obscene levels for services that used to be included in the general budget.
So their next demand is for tax-exempt institutions not to be tax-exempt any longer. Except, they are not willing to be up front about it, and simply try to change the law. Instead, they "negotiate" with nonprofits to make "voluntary" payments. See, it's not really a tax. It's just a gift. You know, sort of like when Vinnie shows up at your shop and "asks" you for a "voluntary" contribution to make sure nothing bad happens to your business while you're asleep.
It's a shakedown, pure and simple, no matter how genteel the rhetoric is.
It is not being spun that way in North Andover, of course. Selectmen say they simply want the college to honor a "promise" made by its former president, Richard Santagati, that Merrimack would donate $50,000 to both Andover and North Andover each year to support the hiring of public school teachers.
The interim president, the Rev. Joseph Calderone, notified town officials this past spring that the college could no longer afford to make those payments, given the state of the economy and a restructuring at the college.
So, selectmen are complaining that the college is breaking its promise. Can you say Catholic guilt? Beyond that, in a juvenile display of pique, two members of the board voted to deny the college a one-day liquor license for its homecoming weekend. Fortunately, a three-member majority behaved like adults.
But even if it was a promise, the person who made it is gone. And public officials are not the ones to be complaining about such things. I have yet to hear any of them complaining about the broken promise of the "temporary" income tax increase from nearly 20 years ago.
When conditions change, a political promise morphs into a "goal" that unfortunately must be delayed, or perhaps set aside. So, why doesn't that apply here? Calderone said conditions have changed.
But the more fundamental problem is that officials want to have it both ways. They apparently want these institutions to remain tax-exempt, yet they want them to pay taxes.
There are reasons for tax-exempt status. In some cases, an institution is devoted to charitable services. In others, it brings economic, educational and other benefits to a community that easily offset the lost tax revenue.
That is surely the case with Merrimack. Do Andover and North Andover want to lose the economic activity generated by 2,600 young people, most of them with significant discretionary income? And that doesn't count the income from professors, administrators and other staff that is likely spent locally — surely some of it on property taxes for homes in North Andover.
If the 100 responses to Merrimack by the Fire Department every year (cited by selectmen) are really such a drain on North Andover, then perhaps officials should insist that the college get out. The town could buy it out and bulldoze it — 220 acres would probably be enough room for 1,000 or so affordable condos, bringing lots of new kids for the school department. Or, maybe a Wal-Mart.
If Merrimack College has the means, and wants to make a donation to either or both of the towns where it sits, that's great. But municipalities should never treat a donation as a regular, dependable source of income. A donation is no longer a donation when it is compulsory.
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Taylor Armerding is associate editorial page editor of The Eagle-Tribune. He may be reached at 978-946-2213 or at tarmerding@eagletribune.com. Read him daily at The Soapbox, the Eagle-Tribune blog at blogs.eagletribune.com/soapbox.
