[Re: "full buildout", originally received via e-mail, posted with permission] I thought a little bit before I used that word, because it does require an explanation. [...] What I really meant was a more 'mature' town. Full buildout means optimum use of all land. This includes residential, commercial, business, state owned. A plot of land that has a house on it returns more money to the town than an empty plot of land. We are getting close to the point in Norfolk where the school costs can be balanced by the residential taxes. That is, we are getting close to the point where we can afford to have a residence without it being a burden on our tax rolls because of the increase in school costs. Let me give you an example. Right now the school cost is about $6,300 per elementary student. KP and Tri County is a bit higher. About 1/3 is covered by the state. Therefore, the net cost to the town is $4,200 per student. In reality it is a bit higher because things like teachers health insurance and building insurance is in the town budget and not the school budget. But this is the way the accounting is done. A family of 4 could possibly have two children in the elementary school. Let use this as the cost average since it is equally likely that the children would also be preschool or KP age. The preschool children would balance the KP children. If that family is paying $8,400 in taxes, the school cost is covered. That means if they live in a $600,000 house, it's a wash. We're close to that now. The developer who wants to rezone Buckley-Mann for residential wants to put in 25 house at $800K to $1 million each. I say welcome to Norfolk. Actually, the numbers aren't even as bad I am making the out to be. Right now we have 3.2 people per house in Norfolk. It has been steady at this number (3.01 to 3.53) for the 29 years that I've been in Norfolk. (There were two years in a row where there was an error in the house count in 1986 and 1987 and the number artificially dropped below 3 for those two years). There is one elementary school student for every 7.7 residents (it peaked at 1 per 9.6 residents in 1987). My estimation is that it will start going back up. The elementary school enrollment is now dropping. It will drop 2% this year (they haven't announced the true number yet, it dropped 2% last year. It will continue to drop and then level for the next ten years. This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that the town will continue to grow in the next ten years as it had in the last twenty. If a 40B project or a condo comes in and drops a lot of housing on us all bets are off. But, the fact that the town can continue to grow and still drop in school enrollment is partly because of that 'maturation' process that I am describing and partly because the second harmonic of the baby boom has already peaked. [...] Regards, Jack McFeeley