PORTSMOUTH — If the townspeople value the handsome 100-year-old barns at Glen Farm, they should be willing to pay for patching roofs, correcting soil erosion, and updating electrical panels, some of which date to 1912.

Alternatively, the town should sell the barns.

These contrasts illustrate the choices that voters face at the polls on Tuesday, in the view of James A. Seveney, vice-president of the Town Council and a leading spokesman for a $4-million open space and recreation bond, and another $3-million bond for a wind tower.

The wind turbine is expected to more than pay for itself, partially offsetting the cost of the open space and recreation bond and resulting in a net decrease in the tax rate for several years after both bonds are paid off, according to calculations by the town’s finance director.

Portsmouth Concerned Citizens, the taxpayer watchdog group, has come out against both bond issues, as well as a proposed Home Rule Charter amendment that would replace the special Financial Town Meeting with an all-day referendum enabling voters to override budgetary decisions of the Town Council.

As for the financial questions, The PCC “supports open space,” says Larry Fitzmorris, the organization’s president. But “this is no time for more debt,” he said in a letter to the editor of The Providence Journal.

Fitzmorris says that Standard & Poor warned the town last spring that further erosion of its reserve fund could trigger a reduction in its bond rating, which would translate into higher interest on future borrowing.

Seveney, on the other hand, said there are about 60 factors that are taken into account when investment services calculate bond ratings, and the PCC has chosen to focus on one of them while ignoring the big picture.

The depletion of the town’s reserve fund, now at about $1.7 million — less than half of what it should be, — has been “self inflicted,” Seveney said, with the PCC sharing the responsibility.

In recent years, he said, both Democrat and Republican-controlled councils have succumbed to political pressure from the PCC to keep spending artificially low, denying the schools the money they needed to balance their budgets and resulting in deficits.

Those shortfalls, in turn, were covered by tapping the reserve fund.

And the 2006 special Financial Town Meeting, in which the PCC engineered a total of more than $1.7 million in reductions to school and municipal spending, was “icing that topped the cake,” Seveney said.

Much of a $1.1-million cut in spending for the schools was later reversed by a Superior Court judge who ruled the town had not given the School Department enough money to meet its legal obligations in the fiscal year that ended last June.

The judge’s decision resulted in a supplemental property tax of nearly $570,000, which was levied last spring.

And because the PCC orchestrated a reduction of nearly $650,000 in municipal spending, Seveney said, the town had to dip into the reserve fund again to finance the open space program, which many in town agree is necessary to preserve the semi-rural character of the town.

If the Financial Town Meeting had not occurred in 2006, Seveney said, there would be no need for the $4-million bond open space and recreation bond next Tuesday. The town could have continued to fund it through operating revenue, he said.

The PCC, meanwhile, says that taxes are too high, and the town can’t afford any more debt, which will just add to the tax rate, currently $11.39 for every $1,000 in property valuation.

Rhode Island ranks 6th in the nation for its reliance on property taxes relative to personal income, but 26th out of 50 states in the amount of revenue it raises from all sources, including the sales tax and a variety of user-based charges, according to a study of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council released in July.

In a separate study done by the state on the property tax alone, Portsmouth ranked 27th among 39 cities and towns, with calculations indicating that its relative tax effort was slightly less than half the town’s relative capacity.

The town now has about $17 million in outstanding debt, according to the finance director David P. Faucher, well below the $90-million limit lenders believe to be prudent.

The cost of the open space and recreation bond, offset by income from the wind turbine, would translate to an additional $46 dollars on the tax bill for a house valued at $350,000 in the first year the bonds are repaid, Faucher said.

By the 15th and final year of payments on the open space bond, he said, the revenue from the wind turbine would entirely offset any increase in the tax bill to the same $350,000 house.

The $3-million bond for the wind turbine — most of which is interest-free — will have been repaid 12 years after the principal has been borrowed, Faucher said.

gmacris@projo.com