Editorial: Making sense of reassessment phase-in

The Island Now

Richard Nicolello recently offered an interesting explanation of why people who have been underpaying their taxes for the past eight years should get another five years following the reassessment of all property in the county before paying their fair share

Nicolello, the presiding officer of the Nassau County Legislature, said that to make people who are underpaying their taxes pay their fair share immediately would impose such a financial hardship that some would have to sell their homes.

This explanation raises several questions.

For starters, what happens in five years? Are the people who are now underpaying their taxes going to get second jobs?

And if some of the Nassau County property owners who have been underpaying their taxes would not be able to afford their homes if they had to pay their fair share immediately, what about the other 50 percent of property owners who have been overpaying their taxes for the past eight years?

They will continue to overpay their taxes under a proposal to phase-in changes in assessments over five years. The proposal, made by Democrat Nassau County Executive Laura Curran with the support of Nicolello and his fellow Republicans, was included in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal.

Have the 50 percent who have been overpaying their taxes – who are generally less affluent and made up of more minority members – been moving out of the homes? And Nassau County?

If so, Nicolello did not offer any proof of this.

Nor did he offer any concerns about the people who have been overpaying their taxes the past eight years.

This may not be too surprising since Nicolello was a member of a Republican majority in the Legislature for the past eight years when county assessments stayed frozen under Republican County Executive Ed Mangano and property tax rates became more and more unfair.

Neither Nicolello nor his Republican colleagues expressed much concern during that period about the county assessment system.

Nor did they express any misgivings about the county not having a certified assessor to oversee the assessment system for those eight years or the assessment department operating with about half of the required staffing.

Nicolello did point out that those who are overpaying their taxes could have challenged their assessments as did virtually everyone who is now underpaying their taxes.

But, by Nicolello’s logic, this does not make sense.

If everyone in the county had challenged their assessments, then the people currently underpaying their taxes would be paying their fair share today, which is to say more. And then we are back to the problem of the fair sharers not being able to afford their taxes.

This assumes, of course, that all assessment challenges were handled fairly — not necessarily something one should do.

Final arguments were made in the political corruption trial of Mangano and his wife, Linda, Monday. Mangano’s deputy county executive, Rob Walker, is scheduled to follow Mangano to court with a trial on political corruption charges of his own.

Someone might want to check to see if registered Republicans, donors or friends of Mangano and other Republicans were treated differently than other people in the handling of assessment challenges.

We do know that people who used firms specializing in assessment challenges – which were among the largest donors to legislators’ election campaigns – did better than taxpayers filing on their own. This could just be a matter of the firms specializing in assessment challenges having greater expertise, for which they were paid 50 percent of the savings. Or perhaps politics was involved. Or both.

Nicolello raised the question of politics when three Nassau residents recently filed a class-action lawsuit against the county on behalf of non-white property owners who they contend were forced to bear the property tax burden of wealthier, white communities due to county policies beginning in 2011.

Without offering evidence, Nicolello responded by saying he believes the lawsuit is a political tool for Nassau Democrats to change the narrative around the reassessment currently taking place.

Politics also seems to be a likely reason for Curran’s supporting the phase-in.

When asked at the on-the-record Community Forum sponsored by Blank Slate Media and Unitarian Universalist Church at Shelter last week, Curran defended the phase-in as better than the alternative of no change.

The county executive deserves much credit for hiring a certified assessor, hiring  assessment staff, purchasing needed software and reassessing all the property in Nassau County

But her explanation, while true, does not offer a justification. Voters facing a tax increase, even one based on fairness, does.

Still, Curran’s explanation is several steps up from what has been offered by Nicolello and county Republicans, who have seized on several stumbles in the reassessment process to criticize Curran, in one instance calling for the resignation of County Assessor David Moog.

This is hypocrisy on a galactic scale.

But Nicolello may still have hit upon an important truth: The county’s reliance on property taxes to fund government is not working.

Even when all county properties are assessed for what they are worth, the system will be unfair because property taxes are unfair, measuring the value of a person’s property — not their ability to pay as done by an income tax.

At the end of the day, an honest discussion of the county’s dependence on property taxes, including a possible county income tax, would be the best outcome of the assessment mess.

Share this Article