By Jim Gomes, 7/5/2000

Massachusetts has an important opportunity to protect its threatened open space, preserve its unique heritage and community character, and increase the supply of affordable housing.

The Community Preservation Act, which has passed both the House and the Senate in different versions, would allow cities and towns to establish community preservation funds that could be used for these purposes. But these laudable goals will be frustrated unless our lawmakers find some way around their current impasse over how to pay for community preservation.

The Senate version of the bill gives cities and towns a choice between a 3 percent increase in their property taxes or a 1 percent tax on real estate transactions. The House version contains only the property tax option and also would give municipalities a modest amount of state matching funds.

If no agreement is reached before the legislative session ends in July, preservation and housing advocates will have no choice but to wait till next year.

Most environmental organizations have supported the Senate bill, believing that a choice of funding mechanisms will result in more communities creating preservation funds and thus more preservation actually happening. Environmentalists also cite the principle of home rule: that our cities and towns ought to be the ones to decide how to raise the revenues they will use.

The great majority of the state's real estate brokers favor the House version. They argue that transfer taxes are unfair because they fall only upon those who engage in real estate transactions, and they fear that a transfer tax would cause buyers and sellers of homes to negotiate smaller brokerage commissions. They also say a transfer tax would be exclusionary, creating a barrier to moving into communities, especially those with higher housing prices.

That environmental and real estate interests oppose each other is not exactly news. That the Senate and House disagree is hardly surprising. But we will all be worse off if the time runs out on this legislative session without a strong Community Preservation Act.

What we need is a compromise.

Let me suggest a few possible ways the legislative conferees can avoid an outcome that would disappoint everyone.

The current Senate bill would allow all of our state's 351 cities and towns to vote for and charge a transfer tax. The House version would allow none of them to do so.

Why not allow some communities to choose the transfer tax option rather than treating it as an all-or-nothing proposition? Perhaps those communities that have previously filed home rule petitions for authority to impose a transfer tax - there are about 70 of them - could be given this power.

Or, to address realtors' concerns about transfer taxes being exclusionary, why not allow the transfer tax option only in our less wealthy communities?

It is places like Boston, Lowell, or Springfield that are least able to raise property taxes to buy open space or provide housing units; they most need the transfer tax option. If Dover or Hamilton wanted to establish community preservation funds they could do so, but not by raising the already high price of admission to their towns.

Another way to compromise would be to allow the imposition of a transfer tax only for a limited period of time - say, five years. ''Sunsetting'' the transfer tax would allow the Legislature to revisit this issue in the future but would let cities and towns get started now on acquiring green space, saving historic sites, and providing badly needed housing units.

Any of these potential compromises would provide more information that the Legislature, municipalities, and citizens could learn from and base future decisions on. Communities making different choices would, in effect, be laboratories of experimentation and democracy that would help us make better choices in the years to come. But none of this will happen unless the various interests are willing to give up some demands and make concessions. Future generations will thank us if we all give up a little to pass this important bill before the Legislature goes out of session.

Jim Gomes is president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, an environmental advocacy and policy organization.

This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 7/5/2000.
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