To the Editor:

(The following was sent to the Board of Selectmen.)

I had a few thoughts about the Wareham financial situation, and I’m sure, but not positive they were addressed in the past.

Wareham has a huge amount of undeveloped land. We also have the CPA funding which is used to purchase land for conservation purposes. Does this CPA fee stop at any point. For example, if five percent of the land was saved as conservation land, does it stop if 10 percent of the land is purchased as conservation land, or has this not been established?

There are a large number of cranberry bogs in Wareham. Would a bog having a net income of $10,000 pay more, less, or the same if it was a business that generated a $10,000 net income?

Wareham has a great deal of low income housing, which I’m sure a few are owned by not-for-profit entities. The not-for-profit entities historically do not pay real estate taxes, but are on a pilot program that might only pay 10 percent of the normal real estate tax bill. Have these not-for-profits been audited? And if they are profitable every year, it should be time to reassess how real estate taxes are calculated for these.

We have two fire departments and two water departments in Wareham. I’m sure that when they were established this way, there was a reason for doing it. Why aren’t these combined and made part of the town budget process? Even without knowing all the details on their structure, going from two entities to one would remove duplicate positions and being part of the town budget process would enable the town to establish their spending goals.

This is a small, simple look at some ideas; hopefully the Board can take some of these and review them.

Savino Magaletta