Another Nassau County resident has filed a complaint challenging the constitutionality of the county’s property tax reassessment.
According to court documents, Massapequa resident Sean McCarthy claims the Reassessment Phase-In Act of 2020, which phased in increases and decreases in taxes over five years, violates “equal protection and due process” and is seeking a permanent injunction to prohibit the county from collecting or levying taxes on real property based on the assessments.
The county, its Department of Assessment, the Assessment Review Commission, County Executive Laura Curran, County Assessor David Moog, the Town of Oyster Bay and the Plainedge Union Free School District are all listed as defendants in the case, which was filed in late July.
Efforts to reach the parties in the case for comment were unavailing.
In his complaint, McCarthy lists four residential properties in Massapequa, including his own, where properties with lower assessed values are taxed higher than other Class 1 properties in the same town and school district.
McCarthy compared his property to one of his immediate neighbors. Under the 2018-19 reassessment plan, the purpose of which was to equalize the tax burden among similarly situated properties, the two properties would share a proportionately similar tax burden.
The lot size of both properties is the same, both homes were built in 2017, and the floor area differs by less than 200 square feet. The equalized 2020-21 tax burden without the phase-in differed by less than $500 for the properties. With the phase-in, McCarthy’s property now faces a $36,870 tax burden, compared with $22,986 without it. His neighbor’s property saw a $2,000 increase in tax burden with the phase-in.
McCarthy called the results from the phase-in “absurd, nonsensical, and grossly disproportionate tax burdens.”
Moog finalized and published the 2020-2021 assessment roll in April, the final step in completing the first countywide property assessment in almost a decade.
“While the health and safety of Nassau’s 1.4 million residents and our employees is always my top priority – now more than ever – I remain committed to fulfilling my promise of fixing the broken system that had half of property owners overpaying in taxes,” Nassau County Executive Laura Curran said in April.
Included are the final determinations, provided by the Assessment Review Commission, on grievances filed after the reassessment on the county’s tentative assessment roll, officials said.
Of the 227,475 residential grievances filed on the 2020-21 tentative assessment roll, the commission made 60,760 reductions of Class 1 properties, according to officials. Last year, officials said, 175,067 residential reductions were made.
According to figures provided by county officials, during the eight-year frozen assessment roll period, the county reduced approximately one million residential cases while one-half of property owners were “unfairly subsidizing the other half.”
Nassau County residents Eric Berliner, Robert Fine, Michael Aryeh and Jill Pesce individually and on behalf of all other homeowners directly affected by the reassessment filed a complaint about the 2018 tax reassessment against the county, the Department of Assessment, Curran and Moog on April 30, 2019.
The four residents are represented by Herrick Feinstein LLP, a Manhattan law firm.
According to court filings, the plaintiffs alleged that the reassessment violated federal due process and equal protection clauses, and did not use accurate factors and market values.
As a result, the plaintiffs claimed that the reassessment yielded inaccurate results and could potentially lead to higher taxes for hundreds of thousands of county homeowners, according to Scott Mollen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs and a partner at Herrick Feinstein.
“The county made a motion to dismiss the entire case and the court has denied the county’s motion with respect to almost every one of our causes of action,” Mollen said. “The court also granted our motion to proceed as a class action.”
Nassau County Supreme Court Judge Stephen A. Buscaria denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against the county and its Department of Assessment.
According to court filings, the county argued that “the plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge the reassessment of residential real property in the county.”
The initial complaint claimed the county’s reassessment method “was performed in an extremely rushed manner, during an unreasonably short period of time, under a veil of secrecy, and with the utilization of undisclosed software, modeling, algorithms, undisclosed protocols and the so-called ‘neighborhood factors.’”
The plaintiffs claim that the use of neighborhood factors was another means by which the market value could be manipulated, according to the lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit, the neighborhood factor was designated as between 0.6 and 1.9 and was then used to either decrease or increase assessed values.
The lawsuit states that Nassau’s assessors improperly used comparative sales when conducting the assessment.
