Officials are currently working to implement an elderly tax relief program, also known as a senior tax freeze, in an effort to help Madison’s seniors in need. Following a Board of Finance (BOF) special meeting on June 8, a special drafting committee has been formed to review the proposed senior tax freeze ordinance and keep the process moving forward.

The program lays out a new senior tax freeze for qualifying individuals for the 2017-2018 fiscal year and outlines changes to be made to the current tax deferral and abatement programs to better coordinate benefits.

To qualify for the freeze, seniors must meet certain age, income, property valuation limits, and residency eligibility requirements. Current modeling drawn up for the program suggests there are 1,639 eligible households, according to Ad Hoc Senior Tax Relief Committee member Scott Gyllensten.

“We wanted to put together a program that would benefit people in town and that would be utilized by those who need it,” he said.

The modeling also accounts for the average cost per non-participant over the years.

“The first year the average taxpayer would pay an additional $15.62,” he said. “By year 2021 it would be on average about $73. That is assuming the average priced home, which is about $500,000.”

The program has been proposed with caps for the amount of benefits available under the program, proposed at not less than one percent for the previous year’s combined town and educational budgets according to BOF Chair Joe MacDougald.

“The basic idea is it starts being funded at one percent,” he said. “So we say we are going to take one percent of what would be the revenues of the town and instead of applying them to people that qualify, we are going to apply it against the tax increases for those people and redistribute the tax burden away from them.”

While substantial steps have been taken to get the program off the ground, some details of the ordinance still need to be clarified including the language surrounding spouses and trusts.

“You want to make sure that it is not benefiting people who you don’t have in mind,” said MacDougald. “It is really about seniors who are financially in a position where this is really important to them.”

MacDougald said they also need to think about the program in the long-term, specifically a reauthorization provision.

“The idea is that after a certain number of years, anybody who is in the program would stay in the program, but they wouldn’t allow new admissions unless the Board of Selectmen [BOS] or BOF specifically re-ups the program,” he said.

The reasoning behind the provision is that the modeling is complex, according to MacDougald.

“If for some reason the modeling is wrong—the town becomes much older all of a sudden or becomes much younger—something in the demographics shifts, you just want to make sure that the system that is envisioned today is the same system that you get,” he said. “By making the reauthorization part of this ordinance, you would want to tell people who are already in it, ‘Hey, your freeze is going to continue’ because otherwise they would have this horrible circumstance where [by avoiding] five years of tax increases, their taxes would skyrocket next year. You need the language in this ordinance to say it is OK to keep the existing people in, but if there is an issue, we’re are not letting new people in until we are sure.”

For now, the new drafting committee will take a closer look at the ordinance before sending it back to the BOF, then BOS, and then to town meeting.

“I have sent it [the ordinance] out to the town attorney to have them redraft it,” MacDougald said. “They have done these ordinances for several other towns and I am hoping that we can meet in a couple of weeks to see if we can have this ready for our BOF July meeting.”

While details are being worked out, Ad Hoc Senior Tax Relief Committee member Ron Hick said this freeze is the right move for Madison.

“Everyone is going to save by keeping seniors in town,” he said.