Room tax set aside symbolic gesture

With the Town of Berlin facing $1 million in repairs and maintenance of the publicly available parking areas, it’s easy to favor taking a 10% slice of the room tax proceeds to help pay for it. The problem, of course, is this is more of a symbolic gesture than it is anything else.

What the council is proposing to do is to solve a million-dollar problem by setting aside somewhere between $10,000 and $11,000 each year toward that goal. In the meantime, inflation and rising energy costs will be pushing today’s million-dollar problem ever higher.

To be sure, town government is in good financial shape today because officials made some some difficult decisions a few years back, when they cured the chasmic deficits in its water and sewer enterprise funds.

They  have been good stewards of the public’s money, but at some point, they will have to take that difficult path again to deal with the parking infrastructure problem. After all, it’s not “free” parking when taxpayers are covering the cost.

Clearly the town is being backed into a financial corner. Given its budget discussions to date, Finance Director Natalie Saleh isn’t wrong when she recommends a modest increase in the property tax rate, but this isn’t the time for that and elected officials know that. They live there, of course.

The mayor and council members also know, however, that nothing stays the same price forever and that their options for providing well maintained parking are limited.

It’s inevitable that one day they, or their successors, will have to do one of three things to cover the rising costs of parking infrastructure maintenance and repair:  increase property taxes to cover it, take almost all of the room tax proceeds, or institute paid parking downtown like most other towns have done … and survived.