Chris Perry Column: Maybe It’s Time To Just Say No

Nantucket, we have a problem.

We have a spending problem.

I am not talking about our summer population who feels comfortable paying $125 for a 10-ounce ribeye or spending $19.5 million for a property in Monomoy in September, which sold for $6 million just three years ago.

I am talking about the local, year-round community whose voters appropriate and spend millions of dollars each year like drunken sailors.

Individually, the items have merit. For example, who wouldn’t support affordable housing, sewer and water expansion, coastal resiliency, or Our Island Home?

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Collectively, the mad dash to propose, pass, and tax primarily through Town Meeting is putting unnecessary pressure on a significant portion of the local tax base. These are the people who must deal with the bigger, year-round picture of skyrocketing expenses such as gas, insurance, rent, food, and utilities while being routinely brainwashed into thinking that spending wildly at Town Meeting is OK.

We hear it all the time.

“Our tax rate is low so it doesn’t matter…"

“Eighty percent of the taxes are paid by summer people, so who cares?"

But unchecked spending is not OK. Nantucket has needs and wants. And far too often, the wants are slipping past the majority of the Select Board members who have opted to follow a less polemical path in their review process.

While island residents still have an opportunity to vote on some of the spending initiatives that are in the pipeline at Town Meeting, the devil is in the details.

For example:

• $950K for a “rain garden” off Hulbert Avenue.
• $50K to fund “an earthquake study."
• $500K for a Greenhouse Gas Audit Study.

Are these needs or wants? Or potentially just a waste of money?

Before we start looking ahead, let’s take a quick trip down Memory Lane and remind ourselves of a few of the noteworthy items that taxpayers are on the hook for:

Article 11 from last year’s Town Meeting authorized $128 million for Our Island Home, which ultimately brought the total for the project to $137 million. Who can forget Select Board member Dawn Holdgate, famously staking her political reputation on the line by standing up in front of the Town Meeting audience and declaring, “The number we bring before you is a fully contracted price - a maximum cost that we will absorb to see this project through.”

However, things do not appear to be starting out too well. If you saw last week’s Select Board meeting, Chair Holdgate quietly announced an additional, unanticipated $200,000 in mitigation payments related to a brouhaha brewing between Sherburne Commons, the town of Nantucket and Our Island Home. This caught her fellow Board members by surprise. And while the expense will be covered by an existing $6 million contingency fund, I think this represents just the beginning of what’s inevitably going to happen down the road.

Again, OIH is a project with merit. But outside of Chair Holdgate, does anyone really believe that an undertaking of this scope and size will truly come in under budget?

Then there's the municipal Housing Department and the Affordable Housing Trust. Since 2019, voters have approved $151.7 million through Town Meeting. As of last December, $86 million has been spent or committed, with this year’s annual appropriation for affordable housing from the operating override voters approved in 2023 coming in at roughly $7 million.

Again, an effort worth merit, but personally, with so much money on the line, I’d like to know one - just one - person or family who has recently taken ownership of one of these properties.

Then there’s the Somerset sewer expansion, passed earlier this year to the tune of $45 million, with more expansion projects to follow.

The Nantucket Coastal Resiliency Plan has nearly $1 billion in potential expenses to the town and taxpayers.

I think you get the picture.

To be fair, I want to again acknowledge that not all of the authorized money has been borrowed yet. But to sum it up using round numbers, the town of Nantucket had roughly $380 million in authorized debt on the books going into Town Meeting last spring.

Then voters added another $220 million in capital projects. Again, while the total amount that was authorized has not yet been borrowed, the additional $220 million that was approved at Town Meeting could potentially bring us up to roughly $600 million in debt. With 600 people attending Town Meeting on a good night, that works out to $1 million dollars worth of debt per person sitting in the Mary P. Walker Auditorium on an average night at Town Meeting. With those types of numbers, it has to bring into question the financial effectiveness of our annual Town Meeting and whether or not it truly reflects the sentiment of the majority of the Nantucket community.

Furthermore, with the Nantucket Public School system experiencing back-to-back years of declining enrollment, it also raises the question of whether Nantucket is losing families because they simply cannot handle the financial pressures of living on the island year-round.

Nantucket is at a crossroads. Are we going to continue the recent spending spree at Town Meeting as if we are the first ones through the door at The Haulover’s end-of-the-year sale? Or are we going to reel it in and concentrate on needs versus wants?

At least two Select Board members want to tighten Nantucket’s belt.

Bob DeCosta and Jill Vieth, the two newest elected members, have spearheaded an effort to review and prioritize the town’s 10-year capital improvement plan, resulting in the Select Board parking roughly $600 million in proposed capital projects. This is a far cry from the years of simply doing business as usual.

DeCosta has been clear about his opposition to unnecessary future capital projects and the town’s tendency to hold its hand out at Town Meeting. As for Vieth, she did not pull any punches last week by saying, “I’m not going to support any debt exclusions at this time” and further clarified her position by adding, “The town of Nantucket is using borrowing in lieu of budgeting and that’s unsustainable. We must respect the taxpayer…”

The jury is still out on the remaining three Select Board members. Will any break ranks and side with DeCosta and Vieth? Longtime Select Board member Matt Fee regularly mentions “raising fees” as a panacea that will cure Nantucket’s financial woes. Chair Holdgate has already announced that she is comfortable putting forth “one big thing” (a capital project) before the voters each year as if it is the Select Board’s annual duty. And finally, Select Board member Brooke Mohr hasn’t shown her cards much lately after several expensive initiatives passed during her term as chair.

Finally, I will leave you with one closing nugget to consider.

Typically, towns like Nantucket borrow money over a 20-year period.

Nantucket used to borrow money at a discounted rate of roughly 2.5 percent. Today, I believe that rate is approximately 4 percent. And considering the pressure to raise rates, it is not unrealistic to expect Nantucket’s discounted rate will go higher despite the fact that the town has maintained an “Aaa” bond rating from Moody’s for many years, which is the credit rating agency’s highest rating.

Assuming all $600 million is borrowed and used to complete the projects as approved at Town Meeting - at the prevailing discounted rates and over a 20-year period - the total principal and interest payments for Nantucket would be well over $1 billion. That’s a billion with a “B,” and that’s before the voters go shopping again at Town Meeting in May.

A lot can happen between now and then. With rumors of additional capital requests bubbling to the surface, it will be interesting to see which ones are real "needs" that should be seriously considered and which are “wants” that will unnecessarily add to the town’s future debt obligations.

Nevertheless, I promise to do my best and stay open-minded as debates over budgets and spending heat up in anticipation of Town Meeting next spring. But I have to be honest with you.

If I'm on the fence when it comes time to vote next May, it might be time to listen to the advice of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, who simply said:

“Just Say No."