Senior tax abatement proposal up for vote

SAUGUS – A law that will allow senior citizens to volunteer their time in return for a tax abatement will be up for Town Meeting approval in May.Saugus and Peabody are the last two towns in the area to accept the law, according to Town Meeting member and state representative candidate Christopher Finn, who proposed the program be added to the May 5 Annual Town Meeting warrant.?It?s a win-win situation,” said Finn. “For the seniors on a fixed income struggling to pay their real estate taxes, it allows them to reduce them by volunteering, and the town gets the benefits of the services they are able to provide.”The program would be for seniors age 60 and older and would feature a maximum abatement for each person, which Finn said is about $1,000.?It?s a small sum of money to a lot of people, but to seniors on a fixed income it can make a big difference,” he said.Finn said it would be up to the town to design a program that would suit Saugus with its own set of procedures and restrictions. An example of restrictions would be to limit it to seniors who own real estate, have lived in Saugus a minimum of five years and in Massachusetts for a minimum of 10 years, Finn suggested.He envisioned a process in which town departments would solicit volunteers to complete tasks such as answering phones or filing paperwork through a program leader. Seniors would then apply and interview with town departments to determine if their skill set is a match for the work. Either the program leader or department head would monitor the volunteer?s hours, so that once they hit the limit of hours worked, they are done.?There are so many possibilities,” said Finn of the proposed program.Finn said the town could also limit it to seniors who needed it most, with income-based applications. For seniors who need the abatement but are incapable of the work, they can assign someone to do that work for them, such as a spouse or member of their household.When asked if the volunteers would be taking away jobs from entry-level workers, Finn said with the rising rate of minimum wage, the seniors would most likely hit their maximum hours in too short an amount of time for it to take away from a possible full-time job.