After the Shoreham Town Meeting on Monday last week and the subsequent Trump address to the joint Congress Tuesday, I am reasonably certain Shoreham is prepared for the steep slide from democracy into tyranny exposed in Mr. Trump’s performance. My family has lived in Shoreham for only 39 years, so I may not have sufficient experience to make this comment.

When I receive the annual Shoreham Town Report, I go right to the Delinquent Taxpayers’ report to see if this year Shoreham Selectfolk have the decency to not publish the names of those unfortunate few. Of course, Shoreham leaders are vindictive, ostensibly because they wrongly think we all are, and those names are there. Missing are the names of the property owners, all eight pages, who voluntarily participate in the Current Use program, which this year adds a 12% surcharge to Shoreham residents’ property owners’ tax liability. I emphasize residents because you do not have to be a resident of Shoreham nor citizen of Vermont to enlist your Shoreham property in the Current Abuse, er, Use program. I cannot vote to accept or reject this tax, (which is far more additional tax burden than the delinquent taxes) because the state makes up an Adjusted Grand List just for Shoreham that substitutes a use value for the far greater Fair Market Value, and that is used to calculate our tax rate. This process essentially imposes a tax on residential property owners without the right to vote on this levy (tribute to land barons). The 2024 Shoreham Town Report doesn’t even bother to make notation of this chicanery, as it has in the past. This sounds a lot like “Taxation Without Representation” which, coincidentally is very germane to Shoreham’s history as the launching point of the American Revolution’s first offensive military victory, the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, May 10, 1775.

Historic giants, like Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen, were in the raiding party that attacked Fort Ticonderoga just a few weeks after the American Revolution began in Massachusetts. They launched from Hand’s Cove and took the fort without casualty. We, as citizens of Shoreham, tread hallowed ground, and it’s near sacrilege to demand revenue from our residents without a democratic process.

It’s been 30 or so years we have suffered Current Use levies without consent of the governed. Instead of making the effort to erect a model of democracy atop that shiny mountain of American Democracy built on the foundation of those brave young patriots’ blood, Shoreham has cobbled a mud slide down its slope, to the Pit of Tyranny, piling Irony and heaping Hypocrisy along the way.

Green Mountain greedy

Currently Abuse neighbors.

Clever cannibals!

Sincerely,

Peter Szymkowicz

Shoreham