Yale Deal - Part 14

From the Yale Daily News: A centuries-old debate over whether Yale buildings should be exempt from Connecticut property tax is taking center stage amid the University’s controversial settlement negotiations with the Trump administration... State Democratic legislators threatened to revisit the exemption in a July letter that urged Yale not to settle with the federal government and implored that it bring the Trump administration to court over the Department of Justice’s inquiry... 

Yale’s earliest tax exemption was included in a 1745 revision of its original 1701 charter. That exemption was confirmed in Article 8 of the state’s 1818 constitution. An 1834 proviso set the income cap for tax-exempt properties at $6,000 and removed a former exemption on the homes of Yale faculty members. Other Connecticut colleges and universities are similarly exempt from taxation per state statutes... The exemption’s roots in a colonial agreement do not necessarily protect it from alteration, University of Virginia Legal Historian George White GRD ’67 wrote in an email...

The lawmakers who signed onto the July letter wrote that Yale’s original purpose of fitting students for public employment has become, in the “modern era,” an obligation to stand “as an anchor institution for free thought, free inquiry, and constitutional government.” A potential settlement with the Trump administration, they wrote, would jeopardize that obligation... Law professor and property law expert David Schleicher said in a Zoom interview that it is unlikely that a court would “ever say that Yale is not fulfilling the terms” of the state constitution. However, it would be “good for Yale to be popular in the state of Connecticut,” he said. The real implication of the letter, he suggested, is “‘if you do this, it would really piss us off.’” ...

Full story at https://yaledailynews.com/articles/could-connecticut-revoke-yale-s-centuries-old-property-tax-exemption.