Western Massachusetts CPUSA

Click here to sign on to the Smith College PILOT petition

Cities and towns across Massachusetts are facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis.

With more than 50 override requests put to ballot across the state since 2025, the public sector has come under siege like never before: when overrides pass, they preserve limited services in a temporary and unsustainable manner. When they fail, essential services break down, primarily at the expense of working families.

Our state’s — and country’s — system of funding public services through municipal taxes has deep roots in segregation. The outsized role of property taxes in Massachusetts comes as a consequence of the unfinished struggle for integration of public schools. With most public funds staying within municipal boundaries, disparities in accessibility and quality of services deepen over time along lines of race, ethnicity, nationality and class. This incurs a secondary effect on rural regions, which lack the local tax revenue to maintain basic services without state aid.

The passage of Proposition 2½ by referendum in 1980, inseparable from the reactionary tide of the Reagan coalition, has imposed an additional vice — the override system itself — on public services. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 legalized charter schools, establishing a scheme by which public funds are allocated toward the privatization of the state’s education system.

Capped at a 2.5% year-to-year increase in the property tax levy, cities and towns struggle to keep up with rising costs imposed by capitalist speculation upon public resources. Across the state, billions of dollars are siphoned each year from municipal and state budgets by health insurance corporations, for-profit contracting for public works, charter schools, de facto racketeering by police and other reactionary influences.

As state fiscal aid (derived from various sources, including income taxes) declines relative to other revenue, municipal governments scramble to shift the burden onto the regressive systems of revenue generation at their disposal, deepening racist inequality with each successive budget. The primary legal mechanisms to attenuate Proposition 2½ involve “new growth” and excise taxes levied through local consumer economies; each incentivizes deregulation and gentrification, further shifting the weight of the crisis onto workers and tenants.

Even the most “progressive” municipal governments find themselves bound to, and reproducing, the same capitalist logic imposed by our state structure. Calls for “economic development” and further recruitment of private enterprise put these pressures on workers’ backs to an ever-greater extent — just as it is the very nature of capital to promote itself as the only solution to its own crises. In defense of our lives and the services we depend on, we will break this polarity with the democratic, working-class alternative. We must begin by shifting costs back onto the monopoly capitalists, as part of the program to decisively defeat them and break their stranglehold on all aspects of our society.

Why PILOTs?

A payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT) agreement is a written agreement between an institution with tax-exempt property (such as most educational facilities, hospitals, land-owning nonprofits, faith organizations, etc.) and a local government. PILOTs are generally negotiated at a percentage of the standard property tax rate.

We advocate for an ambitious approach to PILOT negotiations not because they decisively resolve these structural crises, but because they can win concessions from our region’s most powerful institutions, and give space for us to confront their political role in our communities. For example, Smith College has not committed to a general PILOT agreement for the vast majority of its $530 million in untaxed property, but instead organizes the consumption patterns of its students through a system of vouchers coordinated with the Downtown Northampton Association, the primary conglomerate of the city’s business interests. This system of patronage allows the college to stabilize local circulation of capital and protect its political interests while avoiding a critical, mass examination of its role in the city’s economy.