Strict Property Tax Caps: A Case Study of Massachusetts\u27s Proposition 2 1/2, its Shortcomings, and the Path Forward

Strict property tax caps are statutory measures that limit municipalities from raising property taxes by more than a certain percentage each fiscal year. In addition, they place a ceiling on the total amount of real and personal property tax revenue a municipality can raise annually. Often spearheaded by voter initiative, strict property tax caps are championed by proponents as a way to limit taxes and increase civic participation. Conversely, detractors frame caps as artificial barriers that improperly constrain local governments in their taxing powers. Massachusetts voters approved a strict property tax cap, Proposition 2 1⁄2, in 1980. Proposition 2 1⁄2 provides that communities may increase taxes on real and personal property annually by no more than 2.5% of the total fair cash value of such property. Further, it states that the total annual property tax revenue raised by municipalities cannot surpass 2.5% of the assessed value of all taxable property in each community. In the three-and-a-half decades since Proposition 2 1⁄2 was adopted, many cities and towns have found that they cannot raise sufficient revenue to meet their communities’ needs because of the restrictions imposed by the cap. However, the statute does contain a side-step maneuver: a community can override its levy limit with a majority vote. This Note examines the total number of override votes—attempted and successful—from 1980 through 2010. In doing so, it assesses the impact Proposition 2 1⁄2 has had and is continuing to have on municipalities, namely the services local governments provide to their residents. The data indicates that the number of proposed override votes has increased over time, as communities have found that they are unable to meet their needs under the 2.5% increase limit. Further, the vote totals make clear that successful override votes happen more frequently in wealthier communities versus poorer communities. Based on this data, this Note argues that Proposition 2 1⁄2’s 2.5% levy cap is an unrealistic and artificial barrier. Strict property tax caps place arbitrary limits on the amounts municipalities can raise taxes, without regard to changes in inflation, the cost of providing services, or community needs. The Note concludes by suggesting potential alternatives moving forward

Building Civic Infrastructure: Implementing Community Partnership Grant Programmes in South Africa

This article examines recent efforts to establish Community Partnership Grant Programmes (CPG) in six South African communities. CPG programmes provide the financial and organizational infrastructure to support citizen-initiated neighbourhood projects

Techniques for Constructing Efficient Lock-free Data Structures

Building a library of concurrent data structures is an essential way to simplify the difficult task of developing concurrent software. Lock-free data structures, in which processes can help one another to complete operations, offer the following progress guarantee: If processes take infinitely many steps, then infinitely many operations are performed. Handcrafted lock-free data structures can be very efficient, but are notoriously difficult to implement. We introduce numerous tools that support the development of efficient lock-free data structures, and especially trees.Comment: PhD thesis, Univ Toronto (2017

Relaxed Schedulers Can Efficiently Parallelize Iterative Algorithms

There has been significant progress in understanding the parallelism inherent to iterative sequential algorithms: for many classic algorithms, the depth of the dependence structure is now well understood, and scheduling techniques have been developed to exploit this shallow dependence structure for efficient parallel implementations. A related, applied research strand has studied methods by which certain iterative task-based algorithms can be efficiently parallelized via relaxed concurrent priority schedulers. These allow for high concurrency when inserting and removing tasks, at the cost of executing superfluous work due to the relaxed semantics of the scheduler. In this work, we take a step towards unifying these two research directions, by showing that there exists a family of relaxed priority schedulers that can efficiently and deterministically execute classic iterative algorithms such as greedy maximal independent set (MIS) and matching. Our primary result shows that, given a randomized scheduler with an expected relaxation factor of $k$ in terms of the maximum allowed priority inversions on a task, and any graph on $n$ vertices, the scheduler is able to execute greedy MIS with only an additive factor of poly($k$) expected additional iterations compared to an exact (but not scalable) scheduler. This counter-intuitive result demonstrates that the overhead of relaxation when computing MIS is not dependent on the input size or structure of the input graph. Experimental results show that this overhead can be clearly offset by the gain in performance due to the highly scalable scheduler. In sum, we present an efficient method to deterministically parallelize iterative sequential algorithms, with provable runtime guarantees in terms of the number of executed tasks to completion.Comment: PODC 2018, pages 377-386 in proceeding

Accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies: taking multiple perspectives seriously

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to synthesize work in the emerging field of how accounting and accountability can be reoriented to better promote pluralistic democracy which recognizes and addresses differentials in power, beliefs and desires of constituencies. An agenda for future research and engagement is outlined, drawing on this and insights fromother papers in this special issue of the Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) aimed at taking multiple perspectives seriously. Design/methodology/approach – The paper reviews and synthesizes the central themes associated with accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies, especially with respect to the research studies in this AAAJ special issue, and it identifies possibilities for future research and engagement. Findings – Three central themes are identified: the challenges of achieving critical, pluralistic engagement in and through mainstream institutions; the possibilities of taking multiple perspectives seriously through decentred understandings of governance and democracy; and the value of an agonistic ethos of engagement in accounting. The articles in this issue contribute to these themes, albeit differently, and in combination with the extant social science literature reviewed here, open up pathways for future research and engagement. Practical implications – This work seeks to encourage the development of pluralistic accounting and accountability systems drawing on conceptual and practice-based resources across disciplines and by considering the standpoints of diverse interested constituencies, including academics, policymakers, business leaders and social movements. Originality/value – How accounting can reflect and enact pluralistic democracy, not least to involve civil society, and how problems related to power differentials and seemingly incompatible aims can be addressed has been largely neglected. This issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material to advance further work in the area. Paper type Research pape