Apr 19, 2010
As a real estate tax reduction professional, I was offered an opportunity to appear on News 12 “Long Island Talks - with Lea Tyrell”, which I gladly accepted. My role on the program was to comment on the current debate between County Executive Edward Mangano and County Legislator Wayne Wink.
The County has put forth a plan to reassess residential properties every four years, instead of current annual reassessment. Additionally, commercial taxpayers would be required to have a certified appraisal prepared for their property or face a $5,000 fine.
My response? No Good! The County cannot even correctly assess one year at a time. How can they even think about applying the wrong assessments to properties for a four year period? Furthermore, the requirement for certified appraisals at the commercial taxpayer’s expense in order to get a hearing to protest over assessments is not only illegal, but also bad politics.
To make matters worse, if that is even possible, the County believes that real estate property tax refunds are putting the County in debt; certainly paying back school taxes that the County does not collect is crippling. Their solution? To do something to prevent taxpayers from getting back such high refunds.
My response? The money belongs to the taxpayers who paid on wrong/excessive assessments. We are only trying to get back money that the County should have not required taxpayers to pay in the first place.
There are rumors that the County is reworking this plan. Until then, the saga continues as the County tries any which way to prevent tax protests on a yearly basis, instead of focusing on the real issue…the assessors inability to correctly assess.
Long Island
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Washington, D.C.
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