At tonight’s Town Meeting, to be held at Mount Greylock Regional School at 7 p.m., Williamstown voters will decide on 42 warrant articles, including a provision to allow the construction of cottage court developments that could densify the Town’s housing stock, changes to tax law aimed at lowering the tax burden for low-income residents and seniors, and the first major proposed amendments to the Town Charter since its adoption in 1956.
Town Meeting, both an annual event and deliberative body, is the legislative branch of the Town’s government. Each May, voters gather at Town Meeting to decide on warrant articles proposed by elected boards and citizens’ petitions. Despite its importance to the Town’s governance, the event is sparsely attended — turnout was 7.5 percent of registered voters last year. According to a survey administered to Town residents by the Charter Review Committee, the most common reasons voters do not attend Town Meeting are time conflicts and the inconvenience of attending.
Five of the warrant articles voters will consider are based on proposed amendments to the Town Charter that the Charter Review Committee (CRC) presented to the Select Board in January. This is the first year that amendments proposed by the CRC have been included in the Town Meeting warrant since the Select Board created the CRC in 2022.
The CRC considered many potential amendments, such as conducting Town elections with ranked-choice voting and replacing the current Town Meeting structure with a representative model in which voters would elect delegates to represent them at Town Meeting rather than attending individually — neither of which the CRC included in its list of proposed warrant articles.
The CRC’s most significant proposal would introduce a recall provision in the Town Charter, which would trigger a recall election if voters are able to collect signatures from 10 percent of registered voters in Town — about 500 people. Other warrant articles include provisions to enforce Town boards’ and officials’ compliance with the Charter and revise references to defunct agencies in the document. There are also several proposed modifications to Town bylaws, including moving up the deadline for Town Meeting article submissions and creating a formal role for the Select Board in the budget process. The CRC also recommended a provision that would require the Select Board to appoint a committee every four years to review the Charter.
Four other warrant articles propose changes to the Town’s property tax system. “[The tax warrant articles] are all motivated to give some property tax relief to our residents who have a more difficult time paying them,” Select Board member Andy Hogeland ’76 said in an interview with the Record. “They try to look at both income and assets as a way to measure people’s ability to pay the property taxes.”
The first warrant article exempts low-income residents from Community Preservation Act taxes, which the state allows the Town to collect in order to raise money for a range of local uses such as housing and the preservation of open space. The article defines “low-income residents” as those who make below 80 percent of the area median income ($56,840 for a single person) or people over 60 who make below 100 percent of area median income ($71,050 for a single person).
The other three tax-related warrant articles are home rule petitions that seek permission from the state legislature to make further changes to taxes, as is required for the adoption of certain laws.
Two of the home rule petitions would allow Town Meeting to expand eligibility for the senior property tax exemption in future years. One would allow it to raise the maximum income and asset levels for seniors to qualify for tax relief. The maximum income could be set at up to $69,000 for single people and $103,000 for married couples, up from the current thresholds of $20,000 and $30,000, respectively. Another warrant article would allow Town Meeting to lower the minimum age to qualify for the senior property tax exemption at its discretion, replacing the current threshold of 65.
The last tax-related home-rule petition proposes to institute a means-tested exemption from property taxes for seniors over 65 who have lived in the Town for at least five years. To be eligible, residents must have an income below $69,000, or $103,000 for married couples — the same limits used to determine eligibility for the state’s “senior circuit breaker” income tax credit — and not have excessive assets, as determined by the Town Board of Assessors, which is responsible for establishing the taxable value of real estate.
Hogeland originally proposed some of these measures last September in response to fellow Select Board member Stephanie Boyd’s effort to adopt the Residential Tax Exemption (RTE), a tax policy municipalities may opt into, which increases the tax rate for more expensive properties while lowering it for less expensive ones. Currently, the Town taxes all residential properties at a flat rate of 1.52 percent. The RTE was intended to provide tax relief to lower-income homeowners in order to lower the cost of living in the Town, without reducing government revenue.
However, Hogeland criticized the RTE as imprecise. “Although it does help people who need help, it helps a lot of people who don’t need help, doesn’t help people who do need help, and puts upward pressure on rents,” he said at a Select Board meeting in September. “The goal is to find an approach to property tax reform which is means tested, which means focusing your attention on people with lower incomes and lower [levels of] assets.”
Another warrant article asks voters to permit the construction of “cottage court developments” in the general residence zone, which comprises most of the Town’s built-up residential areas.
A cottage court development would consist of four to 12 detached single-family homes or duplexes arranged around a common area. At least 60 percent of the development’s area would have to consist of grass or other non-paved surfaces.
Cottage courts, while denser than the single-family homes that make up much of the Town’s housing stock, are less dense than three- and four-unit buildings, which voters approved construction of at last year’s Town Meeting.
Unlike three- and four-plexes, which combine three or four housing units into one building, cottage courts allow for each household to live in its own building while sharing common areas with neighbors. “You can think of it as a way of pulling a triplex apart and making little cottages instead of having them all in one building,” Planning Board member and Professor of Economics Ken Kuttner told the Record when the Planning Board first considered cottage courts in October. “It would appeal to a lot of people who might not find a four-plex very attractive.”
In addition to measures on cottage courts, taxes, and the Town Charter, voters will also vote on other warrant articles to fund the Town’s government, contribute to the cost of services — such as the Mount Greylock Regional School — shared with neighboring towns, and appropriate money from the state, among other measures.
Hogeland added that some minor changes to the draft have been made since the publication of the document and that additional amendments can be made at Town Meeting itself.
