NORTHFIELD — Residents will see a $1.41 increase on their tax rate compared to last fiscal year, primarily due to the former Northfield Mount Hermon School campus’s new ownership.
In a joint meeting of the Selectboard and the Board of Assessors, when the current fiscal year’s tax rate was set at $17.86 per $1,000 valuation, Selectboard Chairman Jack Spanbauer said that under the ownership of Thomas Aquinas College and The Moody Center, the property is tax-exempt.
The Moody Center, a nonprofit whose goal is to promote the ideals of 19th-century evangelist and Northfield Mount Hermon School founder Dwight L. Moody, received about half the property from the National Christian Foundation on May 2. Thomas Aquinas College, a Roman Catholic liberal arts college in Santa Paula, Calif., received the rest for the purpose of starting a school. The college still needs approval from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education before it can begin teaching students.
“The campus was paying between $450,000 and $500,000, which represents just over $1 on the tax rate,” Spanbauer explained during the Tuesday meeting. “I know $17.86 sounds extreme, but $1 of that is because of the campus coming off the tax roll.”
At May’s annual town meeting, the warrant showed this year’s anticipated tax rate, based on the Finance Committee’s recommendations, was $16.95 per $1,000 valuation, compared to last year’s $16.45. Spanbauer said the campus’s exemption wasn’t factored in at the time.
“That’s just something we’re going to have to deal with going forward,” he said on Thursday.
The Selectboard and Board of Assessors hope to negotiate a payment in lieu of taxes with the two nonprofits.
“We hope that they’ll give us at least a little money in exchange for what we’ll be losing in taxes,” Selectwoman Tracy Rogers said. “Having students and faculty means more public safety phone calls for us, more traffic on our roads. … It would be nice if we had a little more money to offset those impacts.”
The private schools in Deerfield traditionally have paid that town payments in lieu of taxes and donated other gifts.
Rogers said nothing has been decided yet, though the two boards aim to receive between 20 and 24 percent of what the town would have collected in taxes.
“That’s kind of standard in our research as the best-case scenario in these sort of situations,” she said.
Reach Shelby Ashline at:
sashline@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 257