Court: Seafood companies can't worm way out of city taxes at Fish Pier

The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today that five seafood companies are on the hook to Boston for several years' worth of back taxes on their operations at the Massport-owned Fish Pier.

The five companies have not paid any taxes to Boston - save for one company's single payment - since 1998. The city did nothing to try to collect back taxes until 2004, when the companies' leases with Massport ran out and the authority refused to renew them because Boston wasn't going to sign a statement that they were current on their taxes.

Rather than evict them, however, Massport continued to let them operate, basically on a month to month basis. And then the companies went to court, hoping to reel in a decision that they were exempt from city taxes, anyway, because they are operating on land owned by Massport, which is itself tax exempt.

True, the companies allowed, the law that governed Massport carved out an exemption for the Fish Pier and required commercial "lessees" of space there to pay local property taxes - which puts them in a different pool than the company that leases space in South Station from the MBTA. But since Massport canceled their leases and they were now only at-will tenants, therefore, they were no longer "lessees," they argued.

The companies found themselves swimming upstream with that argument: . Judges kept telling them to pay up. And city tax collectors, now keen on netting new revenue, kept pursuing the taxes.

Finally, today, the appeals court told the companies to cut the crappie. While they no longer had official leases, they continued to pay rent to Massport and they continue to operate under the same basic conditions as lessees. Therefore, under both legal terms and what the court called a "common sense approach," to the law, they were still leasing space from Massport.

And so, the court ruled, the city has the right to haul in taxes and interest as far back as the statute of limitation allows.