Town Angered by Elite Schools’ Tax Immunity : Government: As city’s budget tightens during recession, local lawmakers take a hard look at revenue that boarding institutions could yield.

In this well-to-do hamlet where celebrities retreat for weekends of cherished anonymity, Meryl Streep pays her taxes. So do fellow actors Jane Curtin and Kevin Bacon, and writer Harrison Salisbury.

So, too, do other townsfolk--like Ida von Richthofen, unemployed and facing a tax bill on her $43,000 home of $1,077.84, up from $728.73 last year.

But as for Salisbury School, Indian Mountain School and Hotchkiss School--three wealthy and elite boarding schools that grace this Berkshire mountain town--that’s another story altogether.

They don’t pay a dime in property taxes.

They, like 25,000 other nonprofit private schools, enjoy ironclad freedom from property taxes under state and federal law. And this angers some of Salisbury’s 4,100 residents who, along with other distressed Northeastern communities, are struggling with tight municipal budgets and rising taxes.

“I feel that Hotchkiss, Salisbury and Indian Mountain need to realize that the town they’re living in is in a bind,” said Janet Lynn, another unemployed resident. She was among half a dozen residents who raised the issue at a town meeting on the budget in mid-May.

For nearly a century, Salisbury’s private schools have educated the children of the Kennedys, the Du Ponts, the Fords. Golf courses, hockey stadiums, private lakes and state-of-the-art science labs and libraries abound on hundreds of acres of the most valuable and scenic real estate in the Northeast.

Students pay from $15,000 to $18,000 a year to attend these schools and slip comfortably into the best colleges in the country.

Most in Salisbury agree that these three schools, along with the picture-book scenery, give this 250-year-old town in Connecticut’s northwest corner its cachet.

Hotchkiss, founded 99 years ago by the widow of a gun manufacturer, is especially illustrious, boasting alumni including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, author John Hersey, poet Archibald MacLeish and Time Magazine founder Henry Luce.

But as has frequently happened in past recessions when state and local budgets have grown tight, towns in Connecticut and other Northeastern states with the nation’s highest concentrations of prep schools have begun taking a harder look at the contributions those schools make to the local economy.

“I think it is mostly at times like these that this sort of controversy flares up,” said Joyce McCray, executive director of the Council for American Private Education in Washington, D.C., which represents about 18,000 private elementary and secondary schools.

“My feeling is that this is mainly a Northeastern problem,” she said, adding, however, that her group plans to poll schools in the coming weeks to gauge how widespread this sort of questioning is.

Instead of taxes, Hotchkiss, Indian Mountain and Salisbury do what many nonprofit organizations do across the country: They make voluntary “in lieu” payments to the town. Such payments are expected to total $18,300 next year in Salisbury.

“I believe we are doing a great deal in terms of returning to the community both services and value. I feel comfortable with what we are doing for Salisbury,” said Richard Flood, headmaster of Salisbury School.

But that hardly satisfies some town leaders who point out that private schools own $69.4 million of the town’s $442 million assessed property--land that would otherwise be returning substantial tax revenue. Hotchkiss alone owns $43.5 million.

Half a dozen telephone calls to the headmasters of Hotchkiss and Indian Mountain for comment were not returned. Their respective secretaries said they were too busy with end-of-year faculty meetings.

Carl B. Williams, chairman of Salisbury’s board of finance, said that he and First Selectman Bud Trotta--the New England equivalent of mayor--intend to approach the headmasters of the three schools about boosting their contributions to the town.

He and others say the last thing Salisbury wants is to start a court battle over the tax status of private schools. Such a battle would pit Salisbury against the national private school lobby and would almost certainly be lost.

He hopes instead that the town can persuade Hotchkiss and the others to base future in lieu payments on the assessed value of about 25 homes owned by the three schools and used to house faculty.

Williams, who himself taught math at Salisbury School for 21 years and lived in faculty housing, said that might mean an extra $100,000 in revenues for a town whose budget is $6.4 million.

“$100,000 is not chicken feed in a small town,” he said.

By far the grandest such residence was willed to Hotchkiss by the late Benjamin Belcher, former chief executive of Benjamin Moore Paint Co. The property is easily worth $1 million, Williams said. It now is a multiple dwelling shared by several faculty families.

The schools, for their part, maintain that their cash payments are only a small portion of their contributions to the life of the town.

Flood, the headmaster of Salisbury, said his school runs a Big Brothers group for 30 of the town’s youngsters and offers free use of many of its athletic and cultural facilities.

Some in town feel that criticizing Hotchkiss and the other boarding schools is tantamount to biting the hands that feed Salisbury. Even those raising the tax questions are doing so gingerly. They say the last thing their town wants or needs is a big public showdown.

“This has to be handled with kid gloves. But we want to point out to the schools that a lot of the property they’ve acquired was left to them by the people of this community,” Trotta said. “In the name of good faith, and to keep harmony, they have to look at that.”

Still, some have dropped their small-town reserve and are saying that it doesn’t seem right that Hotchkiss, with its $83-million endowment, or Salisbury School, with its 600 breathtaking acres, won’t help their town more.

Some also question why it’s fair that 27 children of private school faculty attend public school in Salisbury while living in tax-free housing.

“I wouldn’t say we are ‘going after’ the private schools,” said Michael Flint, a 32-year-old carpenter running for town selectman. “We are after information and answers, something that has not been readily available.”

Williams points out that Hotchkiss, in particular, makes far smaller in lieu payments to Salisbury than do some other area private schools to other towns.

Kent School, for example, pays neighboring Kent, Conn., $65,000 based on the tax assessments of its faculty residents and open land, according to Thomas Sides, the school’s business manager.

But spokesmen for private schools say the public often has wildly inflated ideas of how much they could get from these schools even if the exemptions were discontinued.

Many, in fact, are struggling to fill their classes as tuitions soar and the number of school-aged children have decline.

“There’s a perception that these schools have deep pockets,” said Peter Tacy, head of the Connecticut Assn. of Independent Schools. “That’s just not the case.”