Tisbury property owners will have an extra month to pay their real estate and personal property taxes, following a vote by town selectmen Tuesday that moves the due date from May 1 to June 1.
The town also is waiving interest and penalties on tax, water and sewer payments due March 10 or later, as long as they are paid up by June 30.
“We want to do anything we can to relieve the financial pressure on our taxpayers and businesses,” said board chairman Melinda Loberg during the board meeting, conducted online with town officials, employees and residents participating from their homes.
Economic fallout from the pandemic will cut revenues to a degree he can’t yet estimate, finance director Jon Snyder told the board, but the town is on an even keel financially.
“We’re the proverbial aircraft carrier,” he said. “It takes a long time for the impacts to be felt in the town.”
Mr. Snyder said his biggest concern is the short-term rental tax, which had been increasing before the Islandwide emergency order froze rental agreements.
“If we drop back to where we were a year ago, that’s not awful, but we don’t have a sense of what that impact will be yet,” he said. “If someone could tell me how long this is going to last, I could tell you to cut the budget for X per cent. But not knowing that, it’s very hard.”
Tisbury’s investments, a mix of 70 per cent bonds and 30 per cent stocks from a short list of state-approved securities, are holding up well, Mr. Snyder said.
“Town funds are very conservatively invested,” he said. “Overall, our stabilization and investment funds were down 3.3 per cent as of yesterday.”
Also Tuesday, selectmen voted to sign a contract with Main Street Medicinals for a marijuana dispensary on Mechanic street off State Road.
The conditions for approval mirror those in the town’s first retail marijuana contract with Patient Centric of Martha’s Vineyard, signed earlier this year, and include an initial payment of $20,000, annual $25,000 contributions to the town’s affordable housing fund and $2,500 annually for marijuana education and prevention in Tisbury, on top of a three per cent local excise tax on gross receipts.
Main Street Medicinals plans to grow as well as dispense marijuana at the Tisbury location. Proprietor Joshua Silver said his company plans a second retail location on Martha’s Vineyard that would be stocked with cannabis from the Mechanic street operation.
Signed contracts with the town are a prerequisite for obtaining state licenses to dispense cannabis.
“Congratulations, Joshua. You have completed step one on your long journey,” Mrs. Loberg said. “We look forward to working with you and your staff and your group as this develops.”
Selectmen also congratulated Noah Mayrand after approving his application for the town’s first aquaculture license, to farm oysters in Lake Tashmoo.
At a public hearing last month and again Tuesday, some challenged the location, saying it would limit recreational use of the popular saltwater lake. But selectmen voted unanimously to issue a three-year license.
“We have asked our harbor master and our shellfish constable to carefully . . . monitor for potential conflicts going into summer,” Mrs. Loberg said.
Mr. Mayrand must next receive approval from the Massachusetts Department of Marine Fisheries, which will conduct an environmental and species review.
In other business Tuesday, selectmen voted to cancel the town Memorial Day picnic and the Beach Road Weekend music festival scheduled for late July, and to ask the picnic committee to consider a town celebration on Labor Day weekend.
They also discussed canceling the Tisbury School March to the Sea and the Memorial Day Parade, but decided to speak first with the organizers, school principal John Custer for the march and American Legion Post 257 for the parade, about scaling down the events.
The Tisbury Street Fair remains on the schedule for the second week of July. Selectman Jeff Kristal said he would like to see what Edgartown decides about its Fourth of July festivities before moving to cancel the street fair.
Comments
Comment policy »