WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Community Preservation Committee on Wednesday took its first look at the 2017 applicants for CPA funds and returned to the familiar ground of discussing how conservative the committee should be in allocating those funds.

 

Representatives from eight groups seeking Community Preservation Act funding made their case to the body, which is charged with vetting applications and making recommendations to May's annual town meeting.

 

Town Manager Jason Hoch, a voting member of the committee, informed his colleagues that a declining "match" from the commonwealth means the town will have less money in its CPA account for fiscal 2018 than he anticipated when the committee last met in October.

 

The town is in line to receive $44,709 from Boston for FY17, the current fiscal year, to go toward projects funded at the May 2016 annual town meeting. That state match is down 29 percent from the $63,219 state match the town received in FY16.

 

That is a far sharper decline than the drop from FY15 ($65,599) to FY16, when the match dropped by just 3 percent.

 

The bottom line is that the town is now forecasting a smaller carryover from FY17 to FY18 and a smaller total balance in the town's CPA account by a factor of about $14,000.

 

Committee member Jeffrey Thomas argued that the committee should take the entire $14,000 out of the allocations for FY18 projects in order to preserve the $144,000 target the committee already agreed upon to set for a carryover to FY19.

 

That drew a response from Chairman Philip McKnight.

 

"That [carryover] was a target, but we recognized it was a soft target," McKnight said. "We started with $311,000. … If we were able to provide $140,000 toward next year's Cable Mills [bond payment], that would be a nice thing to do. That was not a decision. That was a hope or an aspiration that it would be possible."

 

"We can call it an aspiration or a consensus or whatever," Thomas replied. "The bottom line is we have $14,000 less available than we thought we'd have, and our Cable Mills commitment is not going to change."

 

The town in 2007 voted to commit $1.5 million to the renovation of Cable Mills. The CPA contribution addressed three goals of the act: historic preservation of the Water Street mill buildings, creation of a recreation trail along the adjacent Green River and the creation of 13 units of affordable housing within the complex.

 

The project was long delayed, but in 2015, the town borrowed $1.1 million to pay the balance of what it owed to the developer of the site, which opened its doors last year. The bond payments will come "off the top" of the CPA account for nine more years.

 

The eight projects seeking funds from the committee this winter already totaled $196,501 — more than the committee's stated goal of $170,000 in allocations. 

 

Keeping in mind the lower than anticipated FY17 reimbursement and assuming another drop in the state match for FY18, Hoch currently anticipates that if the committee allocates all $196,501 sought in the current funding cycle, the committee would carry over just $70,000 to FY19.

 

"If we funded everything we had tonight and adjust for decreased revenue, we would have a $70,000 carryover balance," Hoch told his colleagues. "That's the best information I have today."

 

The town opted to participate in the Community Preservation Act in 2002. Since then, a 2 percent surcharge has been added to property tax bills, with an exemption for the first $100,000 in property value.

 

While the town collection under the act has made modest increases over the years with rising property values, the commonwealth’s match has declined in fits and starts since FY08, when the town received $173,115. The biggest drop came two years later, when the state match went from $122,334 to $66,562, a 46 percent drop. The state match actually went up between FY13 and FY14, from $56,821 to $108,760, but since then it has dropped each year, largely because of an increase in the number of towns and cities participating in the CPA.

 

"It's ironic that more people are excited about the program, and that creates a problem for those of us who have been here," CPC member Pat Leach said in a meeting telecast on the town's community access television station, WilliNet.

 

"In all fairness, there's another way to look at it," Hoch replied. "In the early days, it was the towns with the most wealth that opted into [the CPA]. Now that more towns are participating, the pie is being shared more evenly."

 

Chris Winters agreed.

 

"This is all predictable given how this program was structured," he said. "The first towns in were the wealthy ones that could afford to tax themselves 3 percent [the max allowed under the act]. Every incremental town sees that and says, 'Oh, we want a piece of that, too.' It used to be a dollar per dollar match. Now, it's 20 cents on the dollar, which is very different from what this town voted for."

 

Last year, Winters and Thomas asked the Board of Selectmen to ask town meeting whether it wanted to continue participation in the act, a move the board rejected.

 

The idea was resurrected on Wednesday.

 

"I have always advocated, and I know it makes people angry on the board, that we take this matter back to town meeting and discuss it," Dan Gendron said. "If it's better to be at 3 percent [taxation], that's where we ought to be. If it's better to be at 1 percent, we should be there. If it's better not to be in it at all, than we shouldn't."

 

Gendron drew a direct link between the question of future participation in the CPA and the decisions the committee makes this year about allocating CPA funds.

 

"I'm looking at a lot of things in town that need to be done — the high school, the police station, the fire district," Gendron said. "It's a lot of money.

 

"I'm wondering if we ought to — if we're not going to bring [participation] to town meeting, then we ought to be as conservative as we can with our funds and put them in areas where they can do the most good: affordable housing is one. I'd love to fund every single project here. The question is can we really afford them in the long run."