Nassau County Executive Laura Curran introduced plans on Wednesday to freeze property values in 2022-23 at the previous year’s level to avoid fluctuations and provide stability for residential and commercial property owners throughout the county.
Curran said the uncertainty and chaos caused by the coronavirus pandemic led to the development of plans for the temporary freeze of property values.
“By temporarily pausing property assessments, we can allow families and businesses a little more certainty so they can focus on the task of rebuilding their finances at a time of enormous economic uncertainty,” Curran said Wednesday.
The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on local businesses throughout the county have not gone unnoticed, Curran said, but the effect it has had on the area’s housing market is a different story.
According to October statistics from OneKey MLS, a multiple listing service that includes Long Island real estate statistics, the median sale price for homes increased year-over-year by 9.3 percent to $590,0000 in Nassau County. Nassau home prices set a record high of $595,000 in August, according to statistics.
The number of home sales jumped in Nassau by 16 percent from the previous year, with the number of homes going into contract up 65 percent in the county over the last year.
Curran called for the reassessment of approximately 400,000 homes in 2018 after the county’s assessment roll had been frozen since 2008.
During that period, thousands of residents filed grievances on the value of their homes, winning reduced assessments and shifting the tax burden onto others who did not challenge their assessments.
Of the 227,475 residential grievances filed on the 2020-21 tentative assessment roll, the commission made 60,760 reductions of class one properties, according to officials. Last year, officials said, 175,067 residential reductions were made.
Despite the decreases, one of the main officials who have openly opposed the phased-in reassessment is Nassau County Presiding Officer Rich Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park).
Nicolello released a statement Wednesday that expressed his concerns for property owners who will have to pay more than what they normally owe.
“The County Executive’s assessment freeze locks in erroneous values guaranteeing that tens of thousands of homeowners will continue to pay more than their fair share of taxes,” Nicolello said. “She should direct the Assessor to do his job or bring in someone who will.”
Others share Nicolello’s view on the assessment, with some even resorting to legal matters to combat their properties being unfairly assessed.
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, 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.
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.
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.”
Both cases remain ongoing, according to court documents.
Curran has long defended the reassessment phase-in and has told homeowners that it is the only way to fully rectify errors made dating back to former County Executive Ed Mangano’s administration.
“And to those who say, I’m going to be continuing to overpay, I’m going to say that if we did not fix this, you would continue to overplay even more. We’ve got to get this right,” Curran said at a Blank Slate Media forum last year. “This shows why it’s so incredibly important to get things right – so you have everyone shouldering their fair share.”
According to a Newsday study of the reassessment conducted last April, the analysis found the assessments were “well within every major professional standard of accuracy and fairness.”
Homeowners such as McCarthy and Berliner still have legal ground to stand on due to the large margin of error that would occur “in even the best assessment systems”, according to Newsday.
Other findings from the study included that homes located in predominantly minority communities, which were assessed at levels nearly 13 percent higher on average than other homes prior to the reassessment, were then assessed at a level two-percent lower, according to the study.
The study also found that the assessments were off by plus or minus 8.8 percent on average, a figure experts “uniformly said was about as good as it gets”.
