In your article, of Oct. 17, “Legislators concerned about Curran’s assessment plan,” you report:
“County legislators are worried that the new plan could cause property taxes to rise too suddenly for some homeowners, rather than gradually rising to the appropriate level. On Monday, Moog warned that without state legislation spreading the assessment increases over a five-year period, some homeowners could see their property tax bills increase by 20 percent.
Both Curran and the Legislature want state legislation to spread out the increases, but Presiding Officer Rich Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park) said it was a mistake to leave that to the ‘politics of Albany.’”
This is an example of a man sleepwalking through his political career. Yes, it certainly is a “mistake” for someone like Assemblyman Michael J. Norris of Clarence, NY (population 30,673) or Assemblyman Ken Blankenbush of Carthage (population 3,747) having a say in the internal finances of a County with 1.3 million residents and a $3 billion budget.
The question he should be asking is “why is this allowed?” And the answer for him is, like every other anachronism in our government structure, it’s just the way things are, and these “elected representatives” pretend they lack the agency to do anything about it. Which is certainly true if no one tries, or bothers sponsoring legislation to change this.
Does it ever occur to any one of these people to actually question why we surrender our fiscal sovereignty to those who have no constituency here, or have the slightest familiarity with our local issues? Well, according to Nicolello, that’s just the “politics of Albany,” and that settles the matter.
What a brave stand.
Of course, Curran, having already decided to mire her stewardship of the executive’s office in mediocrity, is asleep herself. Does she, or anyone else who knows the history of real property assessment as it practiced in Nassau, really believe we’re going to re-assess our way out of inequity? Again, Curran?
Each and every one of her predecessors in recent history has attempted this and failed. And Curran’s effort is doomed to failure as well, simply because of the stubborn reality that there is no way on God’s green earth to “accurately” assess the relative valuation of hundreds of thousands of dwellings, in which no two are alike. It’s a preposterous undertaking, one that will only trigger another avalanche of protests, just as all the others did.
But what are ya gonna do, huh? That’s the “politics of Nassau” and just because the assessment structure we live with predates Hitler’s invasion of Poland, that’s just the way things are, and no one’s going to lift a finger to address it. So, we’ll just keep our dysfunctional revenue stack in place in perpetuity, where one successful lawsuit against the County throws its budget into chaos, and our “Interim” finance authority can commence its third decade of operations.
Carry on. Please let us know when you wake up.
Donald Davret
Searingtown
