To the Editor:

As you pay your quarterly property taxes this week, consider an alternate scenario.

Imagine that as an incentive to move to Princeton, you are offered a deal for 30 years. Instead of paying property taxes, you are allowed to make a payment of no greater than 60 percent of your assessed property taxes based up your annual income. At the end of the 30 years, your taxes would revert to whatever the current level is. Clearly, you are coming out a big winner on such a deal, and you would be happy to accept.

But who is losing out?

Well, most of the money you pay will go to the town, with a scant 5 percent going to the county. The municipality actually gets more than they would if you paid property taxes, so they are OK with the deal. The county gets a lot less, but they are happy with something. However, the schools get absolutely nothing. Normally, the schools’ share would be about 50 percent of the property taxes you would pay, but in this deal, you get to keep all the money the school would have received; somebody else can fund them.

Fortunately, this is a moral dilemma that you do not have to face because the chances are that you are not a property developer.

This arrangement is real, however, and is called a Payment in Lieu of Taxes or PILOT. Developers love them because it increases their profits. Developers often claim they do not build dwellings for families with children, so their development and receipt of a PILOT would not affect the schools anyway. However, there are families with children that move into their rental homes, and the shortfall from the money that they do not pay has to be picked up by all other taxpayers, regardless of whether they have kids in the schools or not.

It is an issue of fairness. Social cohesion is built on shared responsibility, and at the end of the day, developers do not need an incentive to build in the Princeton market. We all benefit from a strong school system, and we all should pay our fair share.

PILOTs harm our schools and taxpayers.

David Demuth
Armour Road