To the editor:

The Barrington Town Manager's letter that arrived on Nov. 29 (just 2 days before the filing deadline for the senior exemption) contains good news and bad news.

First the good news:

1) after boldly stating in a front-page article just a couple of weeks ago that the town would not make any changes to its announced plans, the town has finally committed to stop breaking the law, by abandoning its demand for financial disclosure from flat exemption applicants. That is a welcome development, that avoids the sort of humiliating and expensive court defeat that the town council in East Greenwich recently suffered.

2) the letter reveals that "dozens of people appear to have received exemptions to which they were no longer entitled because they no longer occupied their Barrington property as their principal residence." That means that the town has already discovered a bare minimum of $13,248 of "found money" (36 x $368) — a total that could easily exceed $20,000 if any circuit-breaker exemptions were disqualified. This "found money" eliminates the necessity for reducing the flat exemption. In fact, the pertinent data proves that the flat exemption amount must be substantially increased, not decreased.

3) any senior who filed for the flat exemption before receiving the manager's last-minute letter and who resents disclosure of their financial information can now go to town hall and demand that the information be returned and not be copied, since the town admits it had no right to that information in the first place.

Now the bad news:

1) the town now admits that the principal statements in its "FAQ regarding elderly tax exemptions" were all false:

a) "all of Barrington's senior tax exemptions are income based, and have been for years";

b) "like all departments in town hall, the tax assessor is audited and ... since exemptions are income based, applicants' income needs to be verified"; and 

c) "Barrington's existing ordinances already granted the authority to the assessor to require submission of tax returns in order to qualify for senior tax exemptions"

Barrington seniors are now asking the question: if the Council tried to bamboozle us the first time, who is to say that the revised plan won't do the same? After all, the wise old adage reminds that "credibility is like virginity; once you lose it, it's gone forever and you can never get it back."  

Yet even this week's letter continues the troubling pattern, by publishing the erroneous statement that "applicants [for the flat exemption] typically applied once, and the exemption granted would continue year after year." I have obtained copies of the application forms going back many years, and they all state prominently that they had an annual deadline.

2) the letter makes a last-gasp pitch for complete financial disclosure on the grounds that it would be of assistance in setting future exemption amounts. That is beyond lame.  

By analogy, the town could certainly benefit in projecting school budgets for future years if it knew exactly how many children will be attending. But would any parent tolerate an intrusive, invasive questionnaire from the town demanding to know how many children they intended to have, and in what years they will be born?

Matt Medeiros

Barrington