Incorporating Cost into the Point System

In order to take into account the financial constraints on acquisition, the number of points that each parcel received is related to the the amount of money per acre that would be necessary to purchase the parcel. The number of points awarded to the parcel was divided by the cost of the parcel per acre. The ultimate unit for rating the parcels turned out to be points/dollars/acre.

It was necessary to include the area in the calculation, because the number of points that the parcel received is independent of the area of the parcel (with the exception of the area category). For example, a 100 acre parcel that had 50 acres of wetlands will receive the same number of points for wetlands as a 10 acre parcel with 5 acres of wetlands. This normalized score had to be divided by a normalized cost. In other words, the amount of money that one would have to pay per acre of resources, along with the priorities set by the scoring system, is what is being evaluated

This calculation creates a scoring system that identifies the maximum amount of resources that can be purchased for the minimum cost. More discussion of this is located in the potential impacts section of this site, where the implications of this are analyzed.

One fundamental flaw in this process is the relationship between assessed value and the market value of the land. It is very difficult to quantify this difference for all the parcels in the town. Efforts have been made to better understand this relationship, but they have been met with resistance from the Tax Assessor.

There should be some relationship between the relative market values of property, and the assessed value. The relative value is more important for this analysis then the actual value of the property, because the parcels of land are being ranked against one another.

More discussion of the limitations of assessed value is in the discussed in the potential impacts limitations page.

For the purposes of this study the assessed value is taken as the market value of the property.

Special thanks to Ruth Platner, of the Charlestown Conservation Commission, for helping solve some of the problems to make this portion of the point system work.