Franklin Matters

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Franklin, MA: Planning Board - 12/20/10 - Agenda

The agenda for the Planning Board meeting on Dec 20, 2010 is attached below. The hearing for the proposal to redo the Knights of Columbus property is scheduled to be continued.

Planning Board Agenda 12-20-10

Franklin, MA

In the News - road reparis

Joan Hallett, 69, who has lived in Franklin for 47 years, said she'd like to see smoother roads, but realizes the town also needs to fund emergency services and schools.

"There's not much you can do if you don't have the money," she said.

Read the full article here:

Franklin struggling to keep up with road repairs

from The Milford Daily News News RSS by Brian Benson/Daily News staff

Franklin, MA

Saturday, December 18, 2010

College information proposal

A lot of high school seniors are working on college applications. Many spent some time traveling this summer to make college campus visits. The college selection process can be challenging. All the schools tout their information in the best way they can. How do you make sense of it all? Dr. Bridget Terry Long, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has an idea on how to make more information available and more easily understood.

As an initial step, the federal government should continue as well as expand its activities to produce the types of information needed to help individuals with their college decisions. There should be information on cost and affordability. In addition to the total cost and net price estimates currently produced, potential students would be given information on aid for low-income students, the debt levels, and loan default rates of previous students. To reflect on the college experience, institutions would continue to report information on expenditures so that current and future students would know where their college is putting their money. Additionally, colleges would be required to give more detailed information on retention and graduation rates, which would then be listed relative to similar peer institutions.

Finally, and perhaps most important, information must be collected on the potential benefits and returns of an institution. Data should be collected on employment rates, salary information, and in acknowledgment that income is not a complete measure of a school’s return, alumni satisfaction rates. Figure 1 summarizes the key pieces of information that would make up a college’s scorecard.

Once the key facts have been collected, this information would then be packaged for families in more usable ways than current efforts. In this paper, I propose three main ways of presenting the college data, each increasing in the level of details given.

You can read the remainder of the article here

Download the introduction and summary (pdf)
Download this report (pdf)

Franklin, MA

Friday, December 17, 2010

DOR will save the Commonwealth more than $120,000

A couple of updates on the tax filing changes coming in 2011:

The growth of electronic tax filing has prompted DOR to make changes in the booklet of forms and schedules that are mailed to taxpayers. A minority of taxpayers, less than 300,000 out of 3.4 million tax filers, submitted state income tax returns on paper last year using the form DOR sent to them in the mail.

Those same taxpayers will receive a paper booklet in January, 2011, but it will be a slimmer version than in years past because it will not have printed instructions or duplicate copies of tax forms and related schedules

......

It's worth noting that the federal Internal Revenue Service announced in October that it will no longer mail paper income tax packages to either businesses or individuals. In its press release, the IRS said it "was taking this step because of the continued growth in electronic filing and the availability of free options to taxpayers, as well as to help reduce costs."

Read the full post from the Commonwealth Conversations website here

Related post on tax filing dates for April 2011
http://franklinmatters.blogspot.com/2010/11/mark-your-calendars-for-two-tax-filing.html

Franklin, MA