December 24, 2013
By Mickey Friedman
The other day, Roland showed me his spiffy new blue hard plastic cover for his MacBook Air. It protects his laptop and has cute little plastic feet to lift the computer at an angle off the table. Fifteen bucks. A good deal.
Since I spend my days writing, and my MacBook Air is my baby, how could we have gone all these months without our own little hard plastic cover?
Thankfully, these are the days of wonder, and of good deals, and there is Amazon. Some more moments of hard plastic cover envy, and then my MacBook Air logged into Amazon.com and snagged us a red one.
You’ve probably seen Amazon’s new delivery drones. I myself am partial to people. Real people doing real jobs. I’m fond of my UPS and FedEx delivery friends. They work hard. In all kinds of weather, lugging packages big and small. Having to park. Having to deal with people, happy and sad, kind or grumpy.
Fifteen bucks and two day delivery. Yes, these are days of wonder and I scan the sky for my Amazon drone. But it’s not as easy as you might imagine to see an off-white drone in a snowy sky.
Anyway, with two days worth of time on my hands I made the mistake of reading the paper. Sometimes not knowing is the best policy here in the Best Small Town in America. Sometimes knowing is bad for your blood pressure. Thanks to the extraordinary patience and great talents of Dr. Ed Weiner, I’m now taking three different but oh so cooperative little pills to keep my blood pressure within acceptable levels. But it certainly didn’t help to read about the sale of our historic, once-best, old and faithful firehouse.
The thing about getting older is that you slowly realize that just maybe you’re confusing what happened with what you dreamt. Or, as Mark Twain admitted: as we grow older we can’t remember anything other than what has never happened.
In any event, I was quite puzzled to discover that not only have we sold this once so very useful building for a mere $50,000 but we very well may be renting space from the new owner for $2500 a month. $2500 a month for up to six years. While the first year’s rent is free that still turns out to be a pretty penny. If my calculator is working, $2500 times twelve comes to $30,000 a year. Which means that in two years, we will have given back $10,000 to the new owner.
Now maybe this is a good deal. I’m not very skilled when it comes to deal-making. But I don’t ever seem to remember our Selectboard telling us about their intentions to rent the very space we were giving up.
Did me and Mark Twain just miss this info?
I can remember our last annual Town Meeting when a bunch of very tired taxpayers were just about to vote no on spending $280,000 to remove asbestos from the old firehouse. Several Selectmen delivered impassioned pleas for a yes vote. Telling us how very hard they had worked to make this deal happen. That it was, without a doubt, the very best deal we would ever get. Trust us, they said. And many us took that to heart and changed our minds and changed our vote.
Looking back, I think that was probably the appropriate time to tell us that one of the ramifications of moving our old firehouse from public to private hands would be the need to find space for the two town offices that were housed there. And that there was a very good chance that we would need to pay for the space we once owned.
Call me old-fashioned but shouldn’t voters know what they’re really voting for. Yes, of course, the amount of rent was being negotiated, and I’m not saying the Selectboard should have told us the exact figure. But I sure would have appreciated knowing their intentions.
For some reason or other, there seems to be a fierce desire to move our aging buildings from public ownership. We are often told about the benefits of eliminating the costs of maintaining these buildings, the repair and heating costs. And we’re quickly told about all the new taxes we’ll be collecting. Lessening the tax burden on all.
But, according to the Eagle, the new owners of the firehouse might apply for Massachusetts Tax Increment Financing. A deal between a municipality and business owner which allows anywhere between a 5 to 100% “exemption from property taxation on all or part of the increased value accrued as a result of development (the “increment”).”
These are the days of wonder. And good deals. And while waiting for my drone, I wonder. And I wonder when in the Best Small Town in America is a good deal not so good?