While the mayor of South Portland recently recommended that elderly residents reverse mortgage their homes to handle a growing property tax burden, the City Council approved over $1 million in their fiscal year 2025 (FY25) budget to be spent on assisting migrants in the city pay for housing and buy food.
Those seniors have also taken a back seat to higher priorities from the South Portland City Council, which has, in recent years, written into the city budget that addressing the climate crisis and promoting “equity” are top goals.
South Portland Mayor Misha Pride’s comments — which have since sparked massive backlash on social media — came amid discussion of a proposal to allocate an additional $100,000 to the city’s Senior Property Tax Relief Fund at an August City Council meeting.
“I just sort of throw this out there because I’ve also been thinking a lot about how especially those with fixed incomes can deal with this, it is kind of a last resort measure, but seeing as our property values are so high, seniors may want to consider a reverse mortgage,” Pride said.
“I know it’s an ugly word,” he admitted, “but there are — I’m just saying, I know it’s horrible, but it’s sort of a last resort.”
A reverse mortgage is a type of loan that allows homeowners to borrow against the equity in their home. Over time, it may put their homeownership at risk or leave little equity for senior homeowners to pass on to heirs.
The proposed supplement to the relief fund was aimed at alleviating the strain that rising property taxes, caused largely by the city’s most recent revaluation and a budget increase, have put on local homeowners — particularly seniors living on a fixed income.
The problem is not unique to South Portland, as property taxes are increasing massively all across Maine as the result of increased spending and inflation-driven increases in the nominal dollar value of property.
The order to allocate an additional $100,000 to the city’s Senior Tax Relief program was later passed unanimously by the South Portland City Council at their Sept. 3 meeting.
However, at the same time South Portland residents are feeling squeezed by property tax hikes, the City Council approved a budget of more than $1.8 million for their municipal welfare program that the city specifically states will be going towards “asylum seekers” — noncitizen migrants living in the U.S. who have pending asylum claims.
The South Portland City Council voted to adopt their fiscal year 2025 (FY25) budget on June 25, 2024. That budget earmarked nearly $1.9 million for social services provided through General Assistance.
General Assistance is a welfare program administered at the municipal level that provides vouchers to impoverished or indigent individuals and families to purchase basic necessities, such as food, housing, rent, fuel and medications.
In a presentation on the city’s FY25 budget given in April, South Portland city officials reported that since January 2023, the city received 2,893 General Assistance, with roughly 2,500 qualifying for aid under the program.
In the detailed line-by-line accounting of South Portland’s approved FY25 budget, the city makes explicit mention that General Assistance vouchers, such as for food, prescription drugs, and rent and down payments, are going to “asylum seekers.”
The three largest categories of General Assistance spending in the FY25 budget are rent ($1 million), food ($400,000) and medical & lab supplies ($50,000).
Under the rent category, the city states that while “emergency temporary housing in hotels” is decreasing, costs to the General Assistance program for vouchers that pay for security deposits and other temporary and permanent housing costs are increasing.
In June 2023, the city entered a 12-month contract to house asylum-seeking migrants at the Howard Johnson hotel in South Portland. Hotels in the city were being used as temporary housing for the city’s homeless population since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Detailing the $400,000 earmarked for food vouchers in the General Assistance budget, the city stated that the vouchers are to “Hannaford and the African Mobile Market.”
“Food costs have increased and Asylum Seekers rely on GA for food assistance until they are pending asylum and can apply for SNAP [food stamps],” the city stated. “This budget had been inflated due to hotel situation but with that subsiding we can start scaling back.”
The city also mentions asylum seekers under the third most expensive category of General Assistance spending, medical & lab supplies.
“Most Asylum Seekers are not eligible for MaineCare (children and pregnant women are) and even a small amount of expensive maintenance medications have increased our spending,” the city wrote.
GA social services outlined in South Portland FY25 budget:
Full FY25 GA social services budget approved by South Portland City Council:
Although the General Assistance program accounts for a relatively small proportion of South Portland’s nearly $50 million municipal FY25 budget, the roughly $1.9 million in welfare spending — which the city states is going to noncitizens — is over ten times the $100,000 the City Council approved for their Senior Property Tax Relief Fund.
0 Comments