{shortcode-f9b1e9c45dc476eec966f449ed54424e7ab3fce4}

Harvard will double its annual payments to the town of Southborough to $50,000 in response to a request from the city to increase their contributions to the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program, the University announced in a letter last month.

The payments are meant to offset the tax-exempt status of its land holdings in the town. Because it is a nonprofit, Harvard does not pay taxes on its institutional land, which in practice deprives municipalities of money that funds their budgets.

As an offset, Harvard has PILOT agreements with Boston, Cambridge, and Southborough to contribute a fraction of what they would otherwise pay in property taxes.

Harvard owns 89 acres of land in Southborough, part of which currently houses the Harvard Depository, an off-site storage facility holding approximately 45 percent of Harvard’s library collection. The area previously housed Harvard’s New England Primate Research Center, which closed in 2013.

In May 2022, Southborough attempted to appoint a PILOT committee with the “objective of establishing formal agreements” with nonprofit organizations that held real estate in the town. Several months later, then-Attorney General Maura T. Healey ’92 intervened, arguing the selectboard was prohibited from delegating such powers to a committee of non-members, in effect blocking their power to directly negotiate with Harvard.

Since then, four of the seven PILOT committee meetings scheduled for Southborough have been canceled. The last meeting of the committee occurred in 2023, though it was largely limited to sharing research on the PILOT programs of neighboring cities.

It is unclear what conversations happened between Harvard and Southborough in the interim. Neither the selectboard office nor the body’s chair responded to requests for an interview for this article.

A Harvard spokesperson also did not respond to a request to comment for this story.

Their $50,000 voluntary payment is $23,773 more than the $26,227 they paid last year, with the amount set to increase by a small percentage each year, keeping pace with inflation.

“Harvard has increased its voluntary donation to the Town to $50,000 for FY2025, with a 2.5% annual escalation after this year,” according to a letter that Harvard sent to Southborough Town Administrator Mark Purple.

Previous PILOT Payments that Harvard made to Southborough were restricted to Southborough’s police and fire departments. However, the new “donation,”as Harvard’s letter describes it, will not be earmarked for any specific purpose.

As part of the deal, Harvard also agreed to hold and preserve documents for Southborough.

“In response to the Town's interest in document preservation for public access through the Southborough archival project, we are excited to offer the Town reserved storage space at the Harvard Depository,” according to Harvard’s letter.

Southborough has faced problems with documents deteriorating in their Town House vault, due to a lack of climate control. Harvard’s Depository is climate-controlled, helping to boost the life of important documents.

“The Depository is designed to provide an archival-quality storage environment that will stabilize the condition—and extend the useful life for a variety of materials,” according to the Harvard Library Department.

Harvard also provides PILOT payments to the cities of Cambridge and Boston, where it has been a target of controversy.

In both cities, Harvard is in ongoing negotiations to update the terms of that program, though progress has been slow so far on both fronts.

In 2023, Cambridge forced the University to renegotiate their terms 20 years into their 50-year PILOT contract after the city exercised its option to withdraw from the agreement. City officials have cited the significant growth in Harvard’s budget and endowment — which City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 noted had “more than doubled” since the contract was first signed — as reasons for reworking the program.

At a Jan. 27 City Council meeting discussing the proposal, Cambridge Vice Mayor Marc C. McGovern described Harvard and Cambridge’s relationship as a “complicated marriage”.

In Boston, meanwhile, Harvard’s payments have been falling short of the amount requested for more than a decade – paying almost $3 million less than the city requested in 2023. The city has been attempting to renegotiate its agreement with Harvard since at least last summer.

—Staff writer Jack B. Reardon can be reached at jack.reardon@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at shawn.boehmer@thecrimson.com