Harvard & City miss their PILOT deadline (by 9 months and counting)

The BRA distributed this spreadsheet at last week's Task Force meeting. It totals the Cooperation Agreement benefits at $25,262,160.

Harvard's total benefits as summarized here gives a total of $25,352,160.


The difference of $90,000 isn't a ton of money, but it is strange that Harvard and the BRA don't agree on the supposed total value of these items.


The status of the Payment In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) for the Science Complex is another interesting piece of information from the BRA spreadsheet. The Cooperation Agreement signed 15 months ago states that a PILOT agreement would be reached by September 30, 2008. But the July 8, 2009 spreadsheet tells us PILOT "negotiations [are] ongoing".


I've written before about how the City under-assesses vacant land, and the Science Complex land is no exception. So even if Harvard is still paying property tax for the former Pepsi parcel which is now part of the Science Complex site, that 2 acre site is worth a lot more than $1.28M and an assessment that accurately represented the fair market value of the land would result in Harvard paying a lot more than $35,000 this year in property tax.