Editorial

How the rich get richer (and the poor taxpayers get poorer)

  Chatham's Reverse Robin Hood
  Homeowners with $3 & $4 million homes ask for taxpayer relief

  This modest-looking Cape Cod style home owned by Richard Miller at 42 Harbor View Lane in North Chatham, a little north of the Fish Pier, is assessed at a few dollars less than $4 million. The inset shows the Miller house from the water. See the other $3,448,000 house below.

By Walter Brooks 

The stories in the local newspapers this week tell a sad story of arrogance and greed by the super-rich of Chatham.  A simple search of the Town of Chatham website reveals that the homes of the two homeowners mentioned in one story as organizers of a new "Save Our Shoreline" group have homes assessed at over $3.5 and $4 million respectively.

   This is a map published in 1860 showing the break in exactly the same spot as today's new break.Hardly the kind of home or family one usually associates with welfare recipients. 

Yet these "swells", many of whom darken our shores a few months in summer, think it appropriate that the fisher-folk and waitrons and other working stiffs who make up the year round resident population of this precious village seaport, should pay for a preemptive strike at Mother Nature by spending $2 million or more to fill in the new breakthrough opposite their pleasure domes.

Hey, they're even willing to throw in a million of their own money. 

National Seashore & common sense common folk

We assume that either the United States National Park system which actually owns the beach they wish repaired, will put a stop to this nonsense, and if they don't, then the good people of Chatham surely will.

It's bad enough that these nouveau arriviste have already forced the town to call for and thus pay for a Special Town Meeting next month to address their needs.  Worse, they know so little about their adopted town that they are unaware that what happened to that barrier beach in April has been happening with regularity at least as long as Europeans have lived along that shore and been mapping it, starting in the mid-17th century when William Nickerson bought Chatham from the local Nauset Indians for a rowboat.

The old timers in town call North Chatham "Uptown" due to its height above sea level, an area in the least danger from wave or tide damage. 

A few thousand angry letters to this online newspaper and the Town of Chatham's Selectmen (945-5105) might go a long way toward nipping this silliness in the bud.

  One of the homes above, owned by Gerald A. Milden of 2 Salt Pond Road in North Chatham, is assessed at $3,448,100. A search shows that the home was last purchased in 1989 for $434,195.
He is asking Chatham taxpayers to spend a million dollars to protect his house from possible-but-highly unlikely damage from the new breakthrough in the barrier beach on the opposite shore.