Residents Seek to Raise Harvard Payments to City

Local residents last night demanded that the Cambridge City Council tile legislation with the state to make taxation of private institutions mandatory and meanwhile to pressure Harvard and MIT to increase their "in lieu of tax" payments to the city.

Representatives of the Cambridge port Homeowners and Lenants Association (CHTA) and other local groups told the council that small homeowners are forced to shoulder an unfair proportion of the property tax burden, while Harvard and MIT remain tax-exempt.

Compensation

Each year the two schools voluntarily pay a combined total of $800,000 to the city to partially compensate for their tax exempt status.

"There's been a lot of people driven out of Cambridge by high taxes already, and we don't want to follow them," Barbara Ware, president of the CHTA, said last night.

Gerald Bergman, president of the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Commission, told the council that "if one person in the city is surviving and doing well, it is Harvard and MIT."

"They should have to pay all they're on a level with the poorest individual in town," Bergman said. "Till we have equality we don't have justice."

No Harvard officials spoke at the meeting, but Harvard and MIT circulated a joint statement citing the economic benefits the two institutions bring to Cambridge, including the taxes the universities pay to the city on their commercial property and their employment of large numbers of Cambridge residents.

Donald Moulton, assistant vice president for community affairs, last night called the statement an attempt "to introduce the facts to indicate that Harvard makes a substantial contribution to the financial condition of the city of Cambridge."

No Immediate Plans

The University has no immediate plans to increase its "in-lieu-of-tax" payments, Moulton said, despite a council order passed March 3 and last night's testimony by Cambridge residents, both calling for such an increase.

At the council meeting, Walter Milne, special assistant to the president of MIT for community affairs, said that it was in the city's interest to "keep the universities healthy."

"Like Shylock, I say to the people here, prick us and we bleed," said Milne, warning that the universities cannot sustain the burden of full taxation.

CHTA representatives said that their purpose in talking to the council was to urge implementation of proposals the council passed last March. The city has no direct authority to tax private institutions, but may ask the state to allow such taxation.

City Manager James L. Sullivan and Moulton both agreed that the chance of passage of any state legislation authorizing taxation of Harvard and MIT is slight.