Though a critic is pushing for local changes, East Williston officials say the village’s property assessment system is largely governed by state rules that they are only administering.
The village maintains its own assessment roll listing the taxable value of its 830-some homes, but any changes to those assessments follow a process governed by the state law and the state’s Office of Real Property Services, Bonnie Kreisman, the deputy village clerk, said.
“These are not rules that we just make up here in East Williston,” Kreisman said.
Stephan Leccese, a frequent critic of the village Board of Trustees and Mayor David Tanner, publicly criticized the village’s system as “deeply flawed” last week, saying it taxes residents unequally because only a small number of homes are reassessed each year.
Tanner said last week that he is “comfortable” with how the system works, but declined to explain it in detail.
The village uses Nassau County’s assessment roll “for the purpose of comparison,” but a consultant independently reviews individual assessments, according to the village’s assessment notice for this year.
The only homes that have their assessments changed are those that have had “improvements,” Kreisman said. To make those adjustments, Mark Davella, the village’s hired assessor, evaluates any home that has been issued a building permit or that has been sold to see if its assessed value should be revised.
A permit or sale triggers a review of the whole home’s value, not just the portions that were improved, Kreisman said.
Some residents have inaccurate assessments because they go years without an adjustment, Kreisman said. That means they can see a big change in their tax bills after making changes to their homes.
Anyone who thinks a new assessment is incorrect can file a grievance with Davella, who decides whether to approve or deny it, Kreisman said. Residents can challenge a denial with a Small Claims Assessment Review petition in Nassau County Supreme Court.
The village cannot change assessments for any home that has not had improvements without reassessing every other house too, Kreisman said.
“They can’t pick and choose individual houses … without doing the whole,” Kreisman said.
Davella declined to comment for this story.
Leccese, a finance executive, said the village could make changes locally to recalibrate the assessment rolls, which he says are inaccurate compared with his own calculations of certain houses’ market values.
The fact that only a handful of homes are assessed each year unequally distributes the property tax burden, Leccese said.
He proposed that the village hire a real estate firm to update all assessments annually based on the Automated Valuation Model, a method that determines property values based on various mathematical models.
“We know it’s a problem and simply just accepting that we know it’s broken and we don’t want to find a view of how to fix it is not an acceptable outcome, I think, for all of the residents,” Leccese said.
But Trustee Anthony Casella said reassessing the entire village would cost about $400,000, which is about 20 percent of the village’s $2 million annual budget.
Officials can closely monitor improvements to residents’ homes in the small village, so annual reassessments probably would not lead to big changes, Casella said.
“It doesn’t make sense to spend $400,000 when probably the results are going to be pretty much what we have right now,” he said.
Leccese argued that his plan would be cheaper and would not conflict with state rules.
He also questioned the fact that Tanner and Casella have done work on their homes in recent years but have not seen their assessments change.
But there are some cases in which Davella determines an assessment doesn’t need to change after a permit is issued, Kreisman said.
Casella, who served two previous stints on the board from the 1970s to the 1990s before returning in 2016, said he only resurfaced his driveway in 2015, which would not significantly affect its value.
Tanner did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
