The Select Board Monday unanimously approved a five-year extension of an agreement with the MITRE Corp. for payments to the town in lieu of taxes [P.I.L.O.T.].
Town Manager Sarah Stanton reported that the fiscal 2023 PILOT will be $1.8 million, almost $600,000 more than the placeholder amount included in next year’s budget.
Increases will be 1.65 percent per year, with payments to the town every quarter, Stanton continued. That’s an improvement over present practice, which involved “a really complex calculational schedule,” she said.
Stanton said talks about a renewal began about two years ago and intensified during the past year. The original payment schedule expired in fiscal 2022.
MITRE, with a campus on Burlington Road east of the Route 3 interchange, is a not-for-profit organization that operates federally-funded research and development centers. At one time the company was the town’s largest single taxpayer, but a court ruling decades ago declared MITRE exempt from real-estate and personal-property taxes.
Twenty years ago, MITRE began providing an annual payment in lieu of taxes starting at $1 million. Stanton told the Select Board that a five-year PILOT is “on par with industry standard.”
She praised the work of Town Counsel George Hall for “really delving in deeply to the tax code to understand the history of MITRE’s tax exemption,” and Ashley Large, town archivist, for researching the history of the agreement.
Board member Margot Fleischman extended congratulations t everyone involved for their “tenaciousness in getting us to this important conclusion.”
Mike Rosenberg can be reached at [email protected], or 781-983-1763
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