I grew up in South Hadley. I went to school here, paid taxes here, and I still call this town home. Like most residents, I’ve watched this community absorb budget cut after budget cut while a $1 billion institution on College Street pays nothing to the town that hosts it.
That needs to change.
South Hadley is staring down a $3.5 million deficit for next fiscal year, with recurring shortfalls of $2 to $3 million projected beyond that. Meanwhile, Mount Holyoke College sits on an endowment valued at $1.1 billion. Under the town’s proposed Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) framework, which Mount Holyoke has so far declined to support, the college’s estimated contribution would be roughly $697,000 per year, approximately 0.4 percent of their $180 million operating budget. That isn’t a burden to them, that’s a rounding error.
The college will likely argue that nonprofit tax exemptions exist for good reason: that they employ local residents, anchor the regional economy, and provide genuine public benefit. All of that is true. But those arguments were crafted for a different era, when college endowments were modest and institutions were genuinely resource constrained. A $1 billion endowment is not modest. The law hasn’t kept pace with how wealthy some of these institutions have become, and South Hadley taxpayers are the ones paying the difference.
Look no further than our neighbor Northampton, where Smith College, sitting on a $2.5 billion endowment, has become the city’s largest taxpayer despite its tax-exempt status, contributing millions through property taxes on non-institutional holdings, direct donations, and community investments. Smith is not perfect, and Northampton has had its own fights over a formal PILOT program, but Smith is at least in the conversation. Mount Holyoke has not even shown up.
There is also the question of why Mount Holyoke should come to the table now, when it never has before. The cost of housing in the Pioneer Valley has risen sharply. Raising a family in South Hadley is more expensive than it has ever been. The residents who make this town work, teachers, firefighters, town employees, are being squeezed from every direction, and the gap between what they can afford and what the town needs to function keeps widening. The Gaylord Library sits directly across the street from campus, serves the college community, and is funded entirely by South Hadley taxpayers. That is a political reality the college cannot ignore indefinitely. Towns have leverage, and South Hadley has every right to use it.
But the most important reason Mount Holyoke should show up is one the college should be able to articulate better than anyone. Mount Holyoke has built its identity around equity. It teaches students to interrogate power, to ask who bears the burden and who escapes it, to name injustice when they see it. Those are lessons worth teaching but they ring hollow when the institution delivering them is the largest untaxed landowner in a town it has never once compensated, while the families living next door to its $1.1 billion endowment are asked to pay more each year just to keep their library open and their kids in sports. You cannot teach equity on Monday and dodge civic responsibility on Tuesday.
If Mount Holyoke College means what it says in the classroom, it should be able to say it with a check. Now, because Mount Holyoke has never been asked to contribute its fair share, South Hadley residents are being asked to contribute more of theirs. The Proposition 2½ override on the ballot is a direct consequence of that imbalance. Residents who have already paid into this community their entire lives are now being asked to pay even more to make up a gap that a single institution could close without breaking a sweat.
If the override fails entirely, the Budget Task Force projects a $10.5 million hole by 2031 and the cuts that follow are severe. Every sport. Every afterschool program. Music gone. AP classes gone. Two police officers cut. At least 15 classroom positions eliminated. That is not a reasonable ask of working families when the most obvious alternative hasn’t even been tried.
I’m not against the town having the revenue it needs. I’m against the idea that the first place we look is people’s tax bills rather than an endowment that has compounded, untaxed and unchallenged, for generations. South Hadley gave Mount Holyoke College a home. Before we ask residents to pay more, it is long past time to ask the college to pay anything at all.
Colin LaCombe lives in South Hadley.