I would like to thank Jeanne Comee Evans for her post about the budget, selectmen and things in general with regards to the Town and finance. I hope many people read her post and get mad enough to show up and demand changes, demand that selectmen work for the town and not just one or a couple issues and to be truthful. In the Gardner News article, there was a mention of a tax rate of 22 dollars per thousand by 2020 which is less than 4 years away. So think about this, right now 0ne dollar per thousand raises about $556,000.00 and the police station addition is advertised to cost about one million and the school is advertised to cost you about 24 million over 28 years with a loan payment per year at about 1,300,000.00. The exact numbers we can discuss later. Just take those numbers and do some simple math. Take the $16.47 tax rate from right now and then figure what amount is needed to raise one million 300 thousand dollars, close to 19 dollars per thousand for just the school, take into account increases (expected) for retirement, health insurance, school assessment for two districts, Monty Tech and NRHS and other things. Keep in mind that one million 300 thousand is based off an interest rate of 3.5%. An increase to just 4% increases the pay back cost which affects the tax rate. So what will is cost to build the school/ No one can say exactly, it is all an estimate until it is finished and that is fine, because if you get what you want, the costs do not really matter, as long as that is said up front! no sales pitch, no magic math, no if you take this and move it over there and add this and change that, etc, etc. No, this is what it will cost on today's numbers from your taxes and this can go up and we cannot tell you exactly what that will be right now, do you wish to do this? Yes or no. All I can say is to look at Ashburham, they built a 30 million plus dollar school and their tax rate jumped 4 dollars per thousand and when asked why, the answer was most of it is because of the new school. Anyone can look that up and I encourage you to do so. I hope the tax rate only goes up $1.74 per thousand, but I expect it to go higher and I expect people will be mad and not really because of the increase, but because they will have been lied to again.

posted by Jeff Bennett