Published February 15, 2019
MELROSE — Melrose MMTV is currently re-airing an interview of Barbara Anderson who played a highly visible and influential role in Massachusetts politics as the longtime executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation and supporter of Prop 2 1/2 before she died of leukemia in 2016. The Boston Globe called her, “A master of forcefully turning complex public policy into something anyone could understand”.
Among the successful ballot questions Ms. Anderson backed were Proposition 2½, in 1980, which capped property tax increases at 2.5 percent of fair market value; Question 3, in 1986, to remove a 1975 income-tax surcharge and put a cap on tax receipts; and Question 4, in 2000, which rolled back the state income tax rate from 5.85 percent to 5 percent. Her greatest triumph, the landslide passage of Proposition 2½ in November 1980, took place less than four months after she became Citizens for Limited Taxation’s executive director.
“We were the best thing to ever happen to cities and towns. Part of Prop 2 1/2 was to give them control over school budgets and to obtain the local aid they had been promised by the Legislature for years”, says Anderson.
The interview was conducted on a program called “Common Sense” by Arnold Koch.
Check MMTV Verizon’s Channel 39 or Comcast’s Channel 3 listings.
