OPINION: Why Are Dedham Selectmen Helping Businesses?

For years, Dedham Selectmen have said they favor small business.

This year, selectmen and other town officials have made some moves that will truly help small firms.

Local property taxes will go up a little less for small companies and a little more for homes this year. Usually, business gets the bigger tax hike.

Also, the town government has decided to finally do a major fix-up of Dedham Square, which will hurt business for a year or more, but will bring about a much better downtown area.

While these changes impact Dedham small business, selectmen and Dedham assessors will try to add a Town Meeting proposal to give small firms tax breaks.

Suddenly selectmen are being so generous to small companies.

Why?

All this pro-business activity comes at one time and has some private citizens livid. Out of nowhere, selectmen are solidly behind Dedham’s businesses and letting more tax burden fall on private home owners.

Is this not selectmen suicide?

Everyone knows selectmen win votes at the polls if they do all they can to keep taxes at their lowest level for private citizens.

Citizens vote.

Businesses don’t.

It is that simple.

So why are Selectmen showing such helpful hands to commercial taxpayers now?

It seems Dedham selectmen have intentionally taken the politically risky step of making it easier on businesses because it is – in their opinion – the correct thing to do.

Looking over the whole year’s business activity, Selectmen have swallowed hard and welcomed the disruptive, wholesale revamping of the downtown. All businesses in Dedham Square will suffer. This will reroute traffic, distress shopping, have streets blocked and make the Square a quagmire for months. Everybody knew that when officials announced that the project was finally going to happen.

Naturally, the fallout would have to be that the merchants in the Dedham Square area would have horrible sales for some time. Combine this with retail sales at historically low levels and the Dedham Square companies could go out of business by the time the Dedham Square project finishes.

Tax relief offered at least some help.

Yes, other businesses will benefit, too, but the help offered to the Dedham Square was too important to risk; Dedham business faced a year or more of depressed business right in the heart of the town.

This was a necessity.

Selectmen knew they would take some flak on this. Even though they knew the criticism would come, they still approved the unpopular tax raise.

Nobody who votes will pay back this favor at the polls.

Yet selectmen voted for it. 

All they did was try to ensure Dedham Square survives its big facelift.

This took guts.