Executive Summary
How to read this report
This is a menu, not a recommendation. Parcenomics surfaces the statutory levers available to Great Barrington and quantifies what each one does; the decision to pull any of them rests with the Town’s manager, staff, elected officials and Town Meeting.
The menu is organized by what each lever does to the money, because that distinction governs how policymakers can use it:
- Grow the base — levers that raise new revenue (new growth, and parcels moving from exempt to taxable status).
- Recover uncollected — levers that capture revenue the Town is already owed (personal-property non-filers, excise gaps).
- Shift the burden — levers that change who pays, holding the total raised constant (the residential exemption, within-class regressivity, split rate, senior exemptions). These are revenue-neutral: they are an equity question, not a gap-closer, and they are never netted against the budget shortfall.
Each lever is written as an ownable workstream — who acts, what it yields, and in what sequence — so decision makers can assign each one to a member working with the relevant board. The closing chapter (BHRSD apportionment) is the exception: it is a shared, longer-horizon assignment for policymakers, not a single owner’s bucket.
The menu at a glance — headline impact
Each lever’s annual impact at maturity, low to high, grouped by what it does to the money. The three groups cannot be added into one number: grow and recover raise revenue, shift is revenue-neutral, and the BHRSD anchor is expense relief. The only legitimate revenue total is grow-plus-recover.
| # | Lever | Family | Annual impact (low – high) |
Who acts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | New growth (Seasonal Communities + ADUs) | Grow | $232K – $927K | Planning Board · Town Meeting |
| 2 | Simon’s Rock reactivation | Grow | $583K – $781K | Assessor · Selectboard |
| 3 | PP non-filer recovery + under-declaration | Recover | $73K – $446K* | Assessor (compliance letter) |
| 4 | Motor-vehicle excise | Recover | ~$25K – $65K (est.) | Assessor · Collector |
| 5 | Boat excise | Recover | ~$5K – $15K (est.) | Assessor · Collector |
| New + recovered revenue — Grow + Recover | ~$0.9M – ~$2.2M / yr | (the revenue total) | ||
| 6 | §5C residential exemption + striated study (20/35/50%) | Shift | ~$1.6M – $4.7M moved (20% – 50%) | Selectboard · Assessor |
| 7 | Within-class regressivity correction | Shift | measured: mild (PRD 1.164); ≈$0 at median | Assessor |
| 8 | Split rate | Shift | limited; pending run | Selectboard |
| 9 | Senior / legacy exemptions | Shift | mostly already adopted; expand at margin | Selectboard · Town Meeting · Assessor |
| Burden shifted — Shift (revenue-neutral, NOT new money) | not added to the revenue total | (changes who pays) | ||
| A | Stormwater utility | Own-source | ~$22K–$68K exempt recovery (rev-neutral) | Selectboard · DPW · Town Mtg |
| B | Parking (net) | Own-source | illustrative; space-count based | Selectboard · DPW |
| C | STR fee | Own-source | 3% max already adopted; collection only | Assessor · Collector |
| D | Vacant-commercial fee | Own-source | de minimis (a stick) | Town Meeting |
| E | PILOT | Own-source | ~$34K–$103K gap; low-6-figs new | PILOT cmte · Selectboard |
| Own-source — PILOT + net parking join Grow+Recover; stormwater revenue- neutral (never summed); STR booked; vacant de minimis | (mixed) | (beyond the roll) | ||
| 10 | BHRSD apportionment | Anchor (regional) | $2.3M – $6.6M relief (today’s $) | the town (shared) |
| Regional expense relief — BHRSD (not unilateral) | $2.3M – $6.6M / yr | (the dominant lever) |
* PP high includes the under-declaration delta (a labeled sensitivity); the conservative recoverable floor is $73K–$240K. Excise rows (4–5) are order-of-magnitude estimates pending the GB registry run, not measured figures.
Bottom line. The revenue levers Great Barrington controls — grow and recover — deliver roughly $0.9M–$2.2M a year at maturity (mid case ~$1.35M). Real money, worth pulling — but against a ~$8.2M FY30 structural gap, the mid case closes only about 16%, and even the high end leaves most of the gap open (see the next section). The shift levers move a larger sum — ~$1.6–4.7M under §5C (at a 20%, 35%, or 50% exemption) — yet raise nothing new; they reallocate who pays and are never netted against the gap. The only lever large enough to bend the trajectory is the BHRSD apportionment correction — $2.3M to $6.6M of relief in today’s dollars (the wealth-floor compromise up to full EQV), growing to $3.8M–$9.1M by FY30 and up to ~$10.5M under dissolution — and it is the one the Town cannot pull alone. That contrast is the argument of the whole menu: pull the local levers, but the gap is regional.
Short-term-rental community-impact fee: already adopted by Great Barrington (a FY27 Housing Trust appropriation) — booked revenue, not an untapped lever. The only open question is a rate review against the 3% statutory maximum, outside this menu.