Above: Harvard University has pledged to almost double the annual donations it makes to the Town in lieu of taxes on its Southborough property, plus allow the town to use its Book Depository to protect old documents. (image cropped from Town GIS Map)
There has been a lot of public discussion about the need to increase PILOT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) contributions from non-profits that own land in town.
Usually, residents and officials focus on the two private schools that own the most land — St. Mark’s School and Fay School. But this month, Select Board Chair Kathy Cook was pleased to announce that another elite school has stepped up in a big way. An over 90% increase is accompanied by a significant in-kind benefit.
This year, Harvard University pledged a $50,000 PILOT contribution to help offset the property taxes the Town can’t collect on their land. That’s $23,773 more than the $26,227 they paid last year. And unlike in prior years, the university isn’t restricting how the Select Board can apply the funds. (In prior years, contributions were earmarked for use by the Police Dept.)
A letter from Harvard Real Estate also confirms their commitment to increase the contribution by 2.5% annually.
Cook announced the news and updated the board on the status at the January 7th and 21st Select Board meetings. She added that the university also agreed to safely store Town documents in its Southborough-based book depository.
Years ago, Town Clerk Jim Hegarty publicly flagged that due to the lack of climate control in the Town House vault, old documents were deteriorating. Since then, he has been overseeing a project to restore and preserve documents (as well as having historic records digitized, catalogued and stored on a publicly searchable archival database).
According to Cook, he has also been working with the university on plans for them to store records in a climate-controlled space in the facility “built” for the Town. The letter from Harvard states:
in response to the Town’s interest in document preservation for public access through the Southborough archival project, we are excited to offer the Town reserved storage space at the Harvard Depository. We are delighted to provide this additional resource alongside our donation.
For those not familiar, with the Harvard-owned property in Southborough. . .
The “President & Fellows of Harvard College” own an 89 acre parcel at 1 Pine Hill Drive in the Residential A zone. The parcel is in a remote area, surrounded by woods, between conservation land owned by DCR (Mass Dept of Recreation) and an undeveloped privately owned parcel off Metcalf Lane. It’s sited on the Marlborough town border and only accessible via a road from the neighboring town.
(Also on the property are buildings where the college’s controversial former New England Primate Research Center used to live. That was closed down from 2013-2015, with all of the about 2,000 monkeys relocated to other facilities.)
That sounds like some welcome news. Please note that Harvard’s endowment is, according to several sources, in the ballpark of fifty billion dollars. (The most recent source has it at $50,877,680,000.) Before jumping at the chance to get some money from Harvard, I hope the Town carefully considers all angles.
Thank you Jim, for taking the important and meaningful initiative to preserve historical documents. It’s a valuable contribution to the community of Southborough.