In Hartford: A Taxing Solution

By Hays Gorey

"The thing generally raised on city land is taxes," Charles Dudley Warner wrote 110 years ago. True then. True now. Never mind the grass, the trees, the shrubs, the vegetable gardens. What nourishes the municipal body is a bountiful tax harvest. But wait: Hartford, Conn., is raising a preposterous, or at least heretical question: Can the city dweller matter even more than the dollar itself?

In economically hard pressed Hartford, spirits have risen a bit this spring. Why? Consider the case of Mary Haley, a slender, brown-haired woman who wears her 41 years well. She arises early, shoos her three resident children (ages 17, 14 and ten) off to school. She orders one to remember to feed the dog, then bustles around a six-room frame house at 61 Monroe Street in a working-class area. The house is 64 years old and tax delinquent. After picking up a stray article of clothing here, dusting a table top there, Mary too is off--to work for the city of Hartford, which could throw her out of her home but won't. Mary Haley is one of 98 property owners who will pay an in-kind tax this year by doing carpentry, delivery, light painting, custodial or clerical work for the city. Hartford, it seems, thinks it is important that they stay put, even though they cannot pay their tax bills in cash.

The overseer of the unique and practical program that allows indigents to work off their tax bills in part-time services to the city (they receive no cash) is David Hargreaves, 34. Says Hargreaves, saying it all: "These people are rich resources." Mary Haley is, anyway. Three years ago, a divorce propelled her into the baffling world of taxes, mortgages, bills. "I knew a lot about taking care of babies," she says, "but I didn't know much about anything else." Untrained, with only a high school education, she was stunned when the $1,100 city property tax bill arrived. "I didn't know what to do. I thought I would have to sell." But she and the children did not want to move. Besides, "How many people want to rent to a divorced woman with four kids and a dog?" The dog would have to stay too; the children made that clear. "You go if you have to," they would say to her. "But the dog stays."

Mary Haley managed to get a part-time job (20 hours a week) answering the telephone for the crisis-intervention support unit at $4.80 an hour. Her total annual income: $5,400 plus $3,000 in child support from her ex-husband. How to erase that tax bill? "The in-kind program was my only hope." She was hired at $4.30 an hour to do clerical and case work for Hartford's juvenile crime prevention center. In her cramped, cluttered office --a stainless steel desk, two telephones, unvacuumed carpet, small white teapot, a naked light fixture overhead, with one of its two bulbs burned out--Mary is talking between phone calls. "The in-kind tax program is super," she says. "I couldn't hang onto the house if I couldn't work off my tax liability. We've been there eleven years. We have friends. The school is only a block away." Mary Haley is also a part-tune student now at Greater Hartford Community College. She hones her writing skills. "I like to write poetry, but there's so little money in that." Most important is home. When classes and her two jobs are over, it is there for Mary to go to. It is there for the kids too. And the dog. "Beats the hell out of welfare," says Hargreaves.

Iva Morill just turned 81. She has owned a frame duplex in southwest Hartford since 1945. Last July the bad news came. Her taxes were delinquent by more than $1,000. On an annual income of $2,080, how could she pay up? Without children, and wheelchair-bound for 25 years, Iva Morill had expected the notice. "I would lie in bed at night, worrying about my taxes."

Now Iva, in a crisp, fresh, lavender dress, is sitting in her small, neat-as-a-pin duplex. "Something about the in-kind program came with the tax notice. I hadn't worked since I had been in the wheelchair, but I knew I could." Iva is dark-haired, feisty and determined. She went to city hall, hired on as a tax division clerk, particularly to process parking tickets. When Hargreaves offered to have her picked up and returned home each day, Iva rebelled: "I'll take care of myself." An independent Vermont Yankee, she drives her own car.

"I enjoyed the work," says Iva, who has already knocked off $1,000 of her indebtedness at $4.30 an hour. "I felt good about working." Before a spinal injury incapacitated her, she was a nurse and a census enumerator. Afterward no one would hire her. "Lots of people who are capable of working don't get the opportunity," she says. Except for a pet rabbit named Kortina, she lives alone. The linoleum floors in her living room gleam. The white curtains above the radiator seem to have just come from the wash and the ironing board. "I'm going to do more work for the city," she says proudly. "I wish more people in more towns could do the same thing."

"Cities should not be in the business kicking people out of their homes," says Hargreaves. If Hartford were in that business, Doris Guiheen, 50, would no longer live in her tiny home with the white, sun-blistered shutters and the green clapboard siding. She is divorced and hard of hearing, and her arm movement is restricted. She was $6,000 in arrears when the tax notice came.

Doris lives on $208 a month, "and it's hard to get in the job market. Without this program I would have lost the house. There was no way I could have paid those taxes." At city hall Doris read papers and documents to a blind city official, did some filing and phone answering and worked in the parking-ticket division. The work made her aware that she could handle a regular job if only someone would hire her. Says she: "Without a job, you get into a rut you wouldn't believe. I've been turned down a lot, but I'm not giving up yet."

The taxes in-kind service is the brain child of a former city councilman, Nicholas Carbone, who persuaded the city to launch it four years ago. More and more of the city's elderly and handicapped were losing their only asset, their homes, because of steadily rising tax bills. It was the city's obligation to help, said Carbone. Since then, Hartford has spent between $22,800 and $66,000 a year for the program. The unions haven't complained, since no budgeted jobs are involved. There are usually about 100 eligible clients, and if there should be more who are worthy, "we'll go after more money," says Hargreaves. "We're doing more than saving people's homes. We're getting them involved in their own destiny." Corey

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