Voters and legislators across Maine are just beginning to sort through Governor LePage’s ambitious new tax reform package. While many of the aspects of the budget are promising, the proposal to allow municipalities to tax large nonprofits is ultimately counterproductive and will put an unnecessary strain on Maine communities. To start, the concept of taxing large nonprofits (defined as those with assessed values over $500,000) is an inadequate replacement for the proposed elimination of state revenue sharing with municipalities. The $64 million per year that would normally flow to localities would have to either be made irrelevant by streamlining municipal…