Flush with property tax dollars harvested from the Great American Real Estate Bubble, Cambridge set aside $50 million to build a new library building for the town. The old library closed three years ago, in March 2005. A friend and I walked by the construction site the other day. A steel skeleton is visible and the building is taking shape, occupying what was once a lovely park where people sunbathed and dogs played. “Maybe it will be finished in time for the complete irrelevance of the paper book,” I noted. “People like to visit the library,” my friend said. “They can borrow DVDs.” I responded that the money spent on the project could probably buy every household in Cambridge a lifetime subscription to Netflix. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Cambridge had 42,615 households in 2000. Let’s figure that the ultimate cost of the project will be $80 million (typical overrun for government and non-profit org. construction). So that is $2,000 per household. The interest on $2,000 isn’t quite enough to pay for standard Netflix at retail rates, but if you assume that (1) you’d get a discount for a group order, (2) not every household would need or want a stream of DVDs, and (3) the new expanded building will consume a lot more in heating and electricity, I think the numbers would work out.
How could we have survived with the old building? It was perfectly functional. It was never crowded. Thanks to byzantine zoning laws, there is essentially no new residential construction in Cambridge and the population is not growing substantially (we had 120,000 residents in 1920; there are 100,000 residents today). Did the old building have enough space for tens of thousands of new books? No. Could some of the old books have been scanned and thrown out? Yes. Could tens of thousands of new books been made available to residents of Cambridge through electronic services? Yes.
[My friend is apparently a good Cambridge liberal because she said that maybe the money should have been spent to improve the adjacent high school, one of the worst performing in the state, albeit one of the most lavishly funded. We didn’t have any fiscal conservatives on our walk (do we have any in politics anywhere in the this country?) because nobody suggested that when nominal housing prices doubled the property tax rate be cut so that the total dollars paid for the city budget remained constant and too-exciting-not-to-spend surpluses of $50 million did not pile up.]
Phil, common misconception here in Taxachusetts. Rising property values DO NOT increase your property tax bills. We have prop 2 1/2 here which allows the tax levy in a town rise 2.5% per year plus any new growth (ie new houses or buildings built that year). So if assessments, due to a boom RE market, go up an average of 10% in a year, the tax rate is adjusted so that your tax bill is the same as last year plus up to 2.5%. Now this is all based on averages so you may see a little more or less than 2.5% but you shouldn’t see a 10% rise. Unfortunately, if the assessment goes down, the tax rate will also be adjusted accordingly to keep the levy (and the tax bill) constant. Our politicians love to hide behind the myth that rising property values mean rising taxes. In reality, they are increasing our taxes, usually with our approval. It generally occurs when a new school, fire station, senior center, library or fill in the blank is proposed. Then it is presented as a 50 cent increase in the tax rate, sounds cheap until you add it all together. We fiscal conservatives are here, alive and well. We are just drowned out by the liberals of this state and the people who don’t pay any attention until they get their tax bill. Then it is too late.
I’m a resident of neighboring Somerville, but typically do my borrowing at the temporary Cambridge Central branch down the street.
I can see how, as a local taxpayer, you might feel that money for a massive project like this could be better spent elsewhere, but jeez – this is an era of dwindling library investment. I’m glad to hear that some towns are remaining committed to these public resources.
I’m bothered by the “you could buy everyone a ” arguments. They work well for shooting down specific claims, such as your friend’s DVD argument. But let’s be realistic: libraries serve a huge variety of people, and provide a much wider variety of services than just DVDs. Community center, technology access, reference resource, classroom, meeting place, and oh yeah, they house books that anybody, even the destitute, can read for free.
I think it’s easy for people who are personally invested in technology to overlook the ways in which racing to digital can disenfranchise people who aren’t lucky enough to have 24×7 broadband internet and powerful modern computers at their disposal. It’s important that the library system embrace digital and offer more and more assets in that area, but I don’t think it’s time to sacrifice the benefits of a shared physical location.
I admire public libraries because they represent one of the few areas of public investment where the ambition is elevated above physical and legal protection. It’s a luxury, for sure. But an investment whose aim is to elevate education and understanding, is money well spent in my book.
Daniel: The old library building already did serve all of the functions that you list. It had ample desk space. It had Internet access. It had a room where community events were held. As I noted in my original posting, it was never crowded. The alternative to spending $80 mil on the new library was not to have no library; it was to continue using the old library building.
For $50 million, you could build 100 Trumpesque McMansions (assuming a cost for materials of $500,00 each with no land cost).
If I stand in front of the library and imagine 100 McMansions piled up on top of the library building going high up into the sky, I can’t imagine what they are going to do that would be equivalent to that much labor and material distilled into the footprint of the new building. (Even though it looks like they are keeping the old building.) Fifty Million Dollars. It really is immoral.
@Paul S. Help me with the math here, you said “Rising property values DO NOT increase your property tax bills.” and that prop 2 1/2 limits increases to 2.5% per year. So my question is, how is an annual increase of taxes of 2.5 percent every year NOT an increase in property tax bills?
Michael,
Of course 2.5 percent is an increase every year. My point was that Prop 2 1/2 limits the increase to that amount every year, which is manageable for most people. Even if your town’s property values increase by 20 % in one year, prop 2 1/2 will hold your tax bill increase to 2.5 % more or less with caveats.
Prop 2 1/2 limits the levy limit increase to 2 1/2 percent each year. Most if not all Mass. communities are in a cash crunch and tax to their levy limit every year. In a reevaluation year, if the property valuations ( the value of all properties in a community) increased 20 %, the increase in the tax levy is allowed to increase only 2.5% plus new growth ( new construction). This is controlled by the tax rate. The tax rate would be adjusted so that the levy (total property taxes collected) would increase only by 2.5 percent. Ideally, this would mean that even if your property value goes up 20 %, your tax bill would only increase 2.5%. Now the revaluation process is not perfect, and your valuation may increase by more or less than the average increase. In this case your tax bill may go up by a little more or less than 2.5 %, but it should be close unless your property was extremely under or over valued before and corrected in the current cycle.
So how do we end up with these large increases in our property taxes? Well that requires deliberate action from politicians and voters. Prop 2 1/2 has provisions for an override or exclusion which allows the tax levy to be raised permanently (override) or temporarily (exclusion) by whatever the voters decide. Phil’s new library probably required an override and was sold to the community as something like a $0.50 on the thousand increase in taxes. Sounds cheap when presented that way, but on a $500,000 home it would mean $250.00 a year. Add on the school override, the new police station, senior center, community center, pay raises and so on, we start talking serious money. Meanwhile the politicians will directly or indirectly blame rising home prices for rising taxes when it just isn’t true. Rest assured, if your property values in your town drop, your taxes won’t. There is a good explanation at this web site on 2 1/2:
http://www.mma.org/images/stories/AbtLocalGov/levylimits.pdf
It’s pretty interesting to watch bloated government bureaucracy maneuver to sustain itself. The latest ploy is to exempt seniors from property tax increases. Seniors have been a key demographic in preventing our property taxes from going through the roof. This is a blatant attempt to pander to them and remove them from the override equation. Hold onto your wallets.