Mansfield Selectmen Table Streetlight Discussion

The Light Commissioners, at Wednesday's Mansfield Board of Selectmen meeting, tabled a plan that would fund turning on $45,000 worth of streetlights in the town.

The funding for the measure would have come from raising the Mansfield Electric Department’s PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes).

Since direct funding from the pilot would require 70-percent of the funding to go to the school budget (requiring $150,000 total to get the $45,000 needed for the lights), a gift account or revolving account would need to be set up to earmark the funding for town use only.

Each method had issues. The revolving account would need to be approved at town meeting, effectively tabling the matter for next year, and the gift fund raised moral and legal concerns that the town would essentially be gifting monies to itself.

“I’m not sold on raiding the light department to help balance our fiscal problem,” selectman Doug Annino said.

Neither issue were decidedly found to be an illegal use of the pilot, but the board agreed they did not have the time to sort out all the details for the town meeting.

Selecman Kevin Moran said he was against using any funds for the lights.

“I know the lights would be good, but, an extra $40 or 60,000?” he said. “I’d rather see that go into public safety, we have positions that are needed there. Just today, we found out we have an additional $15,000 to cover. I personally know people want to have them on, and I know it would be good. My personal opinion is that  I would rather see that money applied to budgets we have coming.”

Most of the selectmen said that they hear from citizens every day about the need for the lights.

“What [the selectmen] are facing with this issue is a micro chasm of what the school committee faces with parents saying we need to lower class sizes and hire more people to do a better job for us,” town manager William Ross said. “Right now, we’re $3 million short of all our needs that the combined organization feels in their initial asking are necessary. We can argue which are necessary and which are not, but I bet you we could find a constituency for every one of those things, but there isn’t enough money to pay all of those bills, so we have to prioritize where the money goes.”

Aptowitz said that he and members of the finance committee are going over the different ways to decide what the PILOT should be. As of the time of the meeting, the PILOT, valued at $480,000, has been basically an arbitrary number devised by the light commission years ago.

“There’s no teeth to that PILOT, it’s just a number,” Aptowitz said. “Maybe the number should be 122, maybe it should be a million, I don’t know.”