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Welcome to www.Bronxville.us a private web site
Call for Public Meeting
Village Needs to Explain Details of Ongoing Village Reassessment
by, Betsy Harding
The Winter 2008 issue of the official Village Bulletin, which recently arrived in our mailbox, provides an overview of Bronxville Village’s “reassessment of properties and refinement of values for the 2008 tax roll.” The information given in this summary provides a tantalizing glimpse at how the Village plans to alter the results of last year’s tax reassessment. The Village should now hold a public meeting to provide full disclosure of the changes it plans to make with ample opportunity for public questions and comment.
The summary notes that the neighborhoods used as the basis for the 2007 reassessment have been re-drawn and re-numbered. Because the assessed value of most homes is based on comparable sales within the same neighborhood, an understanding of how the neighborhoods are determined is crucial. The Village should make public copies of the neighborhood map developed by the revaluation company, the map actually used for last year’s reassessment, and the new map showing the revised neighborhoods.
Among the areas that need a prompt public explanation are the changes the Village plans to make to the assessment of the value of land, as opposed to structures, in each neighborhood and the market trend analysis for the neighborhoods including any analysis that supports the proposed changes to the boundaries of the neighborhoods.
Bronxville’s tentative tax roll must be filed by February 1 and grievance day is Tuesday, February 19. People who are not satisfied with their new assessments will need to act quickly. Given the high level of public interest in the subject, and the immediate financial effects on all Village residents, the Village should be committed to a fully transparent process including a public meeting.
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THE TAX DATA POSTED ON THIS WEB SITE IS FROM RELIABLE SOURCES BUT MAY CONTAIN ERRORS AND THE DATA IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. PLEASE REVIEW THE OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE BRONXVILLE TAX ASSESSOR AND DO NOT RELY SOLELY ON THIS DATA. THE 2007 DATA MAY NOT REFLECT VETERANS AND OTHER EXEMPTIONS. THE 2007 ASSESSMENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE VALUES AS OF JANUARY 1,2007.
WE WILL PROVIDE ALL THE INVENTORY DETAILS AS COLLECTED BY CLT AS TIME ALLOWS. PLEASE CHECK BACK. CLICK ON THE 2007 BUTTONS ON LEFT SIDE.
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THE VILLAGE BOARD OF TRUSTEES REJECTED THE HOMESTEAD OPTION ON MONDAY, NOV. 27, WITH A 3-2 VOTE.
AGAINST HOMESTEAD: MARVIN, BELLITTO, POORMAN.
FOR HOMESTEAD: BARTON, UNDERHILL.
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Please go to the link below to read this lambasting decision " a must read"
Decided on November 8, 2006 Supreme Court, Westchester County
against
The Assessor of the Village of Bronxville, New York, the Board of Assessment Review of the Village of Bronxville, New York and the Village of Bronxville, New York, Respondents
click the above link or copy and paste the link below in your web browser
www.courts.state.ny.us/Reporter/3dseries/2006/2006_52106.htm
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My Thoughts on the Homestead Option
By Betsy Harding Nov. 20, 2006
Once the big push was over for trying to get the Village to reassess, I started thinking more about the Homestead Option. I concluded that it would be very difficult to get the school budget passed each spring if the School Board had to tell one group of people they were getting a different tax rate increase from another group. Whichever group had the higher rate of increase would feel picked on and might not vote for the budget. I also worried that it would place a huge burden on the School District to have to re-educate everybody every spring about why there were different tax rates for the two different groups. After listening to arguments in favor of Homestead I have still not heard any compelling reason for the Board of Trustees to adopt Homestead.
The purpose of the Homestead Option is to soften the blow to one, two, and three family homeowners who are likely, as a group, to experience tax increases after a reassessment. Although this would make sense to me if our commercial class were composed of large businesses, in Bronxville our commercial class is made up of people, people who live here and people who operate small businesses and are also part of the community. Adopting Homestead would mean telling people who are entitled to a tax reduction that they must continue to subsidize people in houses who have been under taxed, as a group, before the reassessment.
The figures given out by the State on Monday, Nov. 13, show that only 16.21 percent of houses would have their assessments increased by more than 25 percent due to the reassessment. I think it is safe to assume that this group includes many of the houses that were substantially improved but not reassessed for the improvements as well as some of the more valuable houses that are under assessed due to changes in market conditions. It is important to remember that the owners of these houses have been receiving a tax benefit provided by the property owners who have been over assessed. While it is hard to give up a subsidy, I think the time has come.
We are all concerned about older people on fixed incomes who may have trouble paying their taxes no matter where they live. To the extent that there are people in that situation who are living in valuable under assessed houses, the reverse mortgage provides a means of paying the taxes required to continue to live in the same house as long as it is physically possible. I hope everyone can agree that people who own second houses (such as me and my husband) do not need protection from increased taxes in Bronxville, particularly if that protection comes in the form of a subsidy from Villagers who live in apartments and small business owners.
The focus on the Homestead Option has refreshed the resentment some house owners feel about New York State’s required method of assessing most cooperative and condominium housing. As a means of facilitating the wave of apartment conversions in the 1980’s, the legislature required that most co-ops and condos be taxed as though they were still rental buildings. This generally produces a lower assessment than if the buildings were taxed on the value of each individual unit added up to a total. The law may have outlived its purpose but it is still the law. Any discussion about whether or not it is fair is basically irrelevant. Unfortunately, this law stirs up a great deal of animosity from at least a handful of single family homeowners. My feeling is that the dollars involved are small -- the cost to other taxpayers from this law is just not all that great -- and it’s not worth worrying about. Whatever tax advantage there may be to owning an apartment, as opposed to a house, is an advantage that is available on an equal basis to everyone who wants to own an apartment.
Another reason not to adopt the Homestead Option is the possible negative impact on Bronxville’s business owners. The State has not done an analysis of the intra-class shift that may occur in the commercial (non-Homestead) group if Homestead is adopted. The Village’s impact study on reassessment, which was produced last winter by Joe Eckert, predicted a large shift in the tax burden from the apartment buildings to the store/office buildings after reassessment if Homestead is adopted. The prediction was based on limited data, basically the recent sales in the business district. In Bronxville’s most recent tax cert case, a New York State Supreme Court judge reaffirmed that recent fair market sales are the best indicators of value for assessments. There is a link to this case on the website.
According to information given out at the November 13 meeting, the Village seems to be using the income approach to value for the store/office buildings as well as the apartment buildings. The Village is using a capitalization rate of 6.25 percent for the apartment buildings and 7.0 to 7.5 for the office/business buildings. There will almost certainly be litigation over the 6.25 cap rate. If the rate is not upheld, and Homestead has been adopted, there could be a major shift in tax burden from the apartments to the store/office buildings.
At a minimum, I don’t think the Trustees should adopt Homestead without having projections of what that shift would be under various scenarios.
In sum, I am against the Homestead option for Bronxville.
I will post further thoughts in the future just in case anybody is interested.
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Review and Comments by Bruce W. Sauter
March 1, 2006
Analyses of the Tax Related Impacts of Completing a Revaluation of Real Property in the Village of Bronxville prepared by Joseph K. Eckert, Ph. D., Senior Economist, PADCO, 1025 Thomas Jefferson Street NW, Suite 170, Washington, D.C. 20007
Statements made and comments:
“… adopting a homestead tax policy that provides for a split tax rate between residential and all other property classes will further increase the possibilities for tax shifts.” (Page 1, paragraph 1) … and … “The average tax bill increase for commercial properties was 51.6%, nearly double the result …” [of not using the Homestead split tax rate option]. (Page 6, paragraph 1)
Comment: I tend to agree that within classes of property, the possibilities of tax shifts are more likely because they cannot be distributed across the entire tax base.
“This study is properly regarded as an early suggestion of the direction in which taxation of broad classes of properties may move, but is by no means conclusive or precise. This is due to several factors. Principally among them are (a) a serious lack of property inventory data that, paradoxically, will only be sufficiently gathered during and following a revaluation effort; (b) the miniscule number of commercial sales that occurred during the relevant time period studied; and (c) the fact that for assessment purposes condominium and cooperative unit sales must be ignored, and our analysis was therefore restricted to a review of only [a] small sample of limited appraisals performed for a purpose other than this study.” (Page 1, paragraph 2)
“The conclusions contained in this study at this point in time, however, are strictly for informational purposes only and may well turn out to be in error should the underlying data turn out to be different from that from which we relied upon.” (Page 1, paragraph 3)
Comment: As we indicated before the “Impact Study” was commissioned this study is not conclusive or precise for many reasons and any conclusions drawn could easily be erroneous..
“… the tax implications specified in this report are broad and not specific to individual properties; within each tax class, even where the overall tax burden may increase or decrease, this is only an average and we can expect that many individual properties will move in an opposite direction or will experience significant differences in the actual tax burden after revaluation than other properties in the class or grouping.” (Page 1, paragraph 4)
Comment: Given the dispersion indicated within the residential class of property as indicated by Eckert’s prior report and the inter-class inequity he statistically determined and used to adjust the class portions in this impact study, revaluation is obviously necessary unless protecting the current inequities is the goal.
“The results of this study suggest … the tax burden will shift significantly from the condominiums, cooperatives, and apartment houses to the commercial class and the residential class of properties. Overall average increase in residential individual tax bills of 9.1% … an average Village-wide. Likewise, the mean [i.e., average] commercial property tax bill for commercial property will increase 26% … Condominiums, cooperatives, and apartment houses would … drop in taxes of some 60% on average.” (Page 2, paragraph 1)
Comment: Without seeing his primary data, it is difficult to refute that bias may be evident in the sales that occurred. It would be very important to at least know the confidence bands (preferably at the 95% confidence limit) around the statistics indicated.[1] Given the wide dispersion, this is similar to discussing how people drown in the lake with an average depth of 2 inches!
“If this [the homestead program where condominium properties are reclassified as residential property] were done, … the average tax bill for residential properties (including condominiums) would increase by 7%, … commercial properties would increase 24%, and the cooperatives/apartments would decrease some 61%. (Page 2, paragraph 2)
“… the effects of a split tax rate under the homestead option … indicates, zero average change in the [reclassified] residential properties while the average tax bill increase for commercial properties was 51.6% and condominiums, cooperatives, and apartments would decrease by about 52%.” (Page 2, paragraph 3)
While of limited difference upon which to draw broad conclusions, I would disagree with Mr. Eckert use of “mean” or “average” as the statistic for neighborhood changes indicated on page 2, paragraph 4, when his prior report indicated that the sales ratios are not normally distributed and that the limited sales that occurred cannot be authenticated (without much more extensive and accurate property data) as representative of all other properties within those neighborhoods. He indicates that neighborhood 6 would increase on an average of 19% and neighborhood 7 would increase by 1%, yet if we quote the median change shown in his own statistics (a more appropriate statistic for both low sample sizes and non-parametric distributions), neighborhood 6 would only increase 16%, neighborhood 7 would increase by 1.6 % and neighborhood 5 would statistically indicate a potential tax decrease of 2.2%. His statistical analysis further shows that the Coefficient of Dispersion (COD) exceeds the median increase in every neighborhood. This would statistically imply that many properties within every neighborhood could actually experience a decrease in tax impact in a revenue neutral situation. Although not mentioned in Mr. Eckert’s report, the school district may not accept the Homestead Option even if the Village decides to implement the Option.
“Condominiums, apartment buildings, and cooperative apartments will be treated as a separate class for this analysis because New York State law requires the income approach to value be used to value these types of residential properties.” (Page 3, paragraph 1) … and …
“The class 411 properties under state law must be appraised using the income approach to value. (Page 4, paragraph 2).
Comment: The only restriction on the approach that must be used to value these property types in New York State is on condominium and cooperative ownership (RPTL § 339Y) and (RPTL § 581). There are no restrictions on the valuation of regular apartment houses.
“The interior data came from a multiple listing service and an on-site inspection obtained coordinate and relative condition data.” (Page 4, paragraph 1)
Comment: Mr. Eckert’s “impact” report does not indicate that the living area was determined from the on-site inspection. With the sizable discrepancies revealed on the data collection cards, I would be concerned about the validity of any conclusions drawn on the basis of price per square foot as shown in Exhibit 4. If the living area was re-verified during the on-site inspection the mean or median price per square foot would have some value. However, since sale price per square foot also varies with the total living area, comparison between neighborhoods with dissimilar mean sizes would distort the validity of the conclusions drawn. The mean or median size in each neighborhood should have been identified.
“One hundred fifty-six residential properties were included in the data file spanning the years from 2003 to 2005.” (Page 4, paragraph 1)
Comment: If there were 156 sales, it is not clear why only 136 sales were used in the data Exhibits 4 and 5. The report is inconsistent without clarification. The lack of an explanation for the missing sales leaves the report susceptible to potential feelings that selective editing may have been done to reach predetermined conclusions. I would assume that there may be a simple explanation, but it should have been disclosed.
“The sales were trended to January 2006 and the ratio was computed.” (Page 4, paragraph 2) … and … “The monthly inflation factor estimated via the modeling process was used to update sales prices to January 2006.” (Page 5, paragraph 1)
Comment: This is a crucial part of the impact analysis. The report does not disclose the time adjustment used although it implies that a linear monthly trend was used Village-wide. There are many different ways to determine a time adjustment. Adjusting the sale prices create the mathematical possibility to reach any conclusion. This needs to be explained and supported with detailed data before results have any credibility or usefulness.
Stage One Results:
Initial Comment: Mr. Eckert’s analysis reports indicate 202 properties in the 411 property classification (i.e., 13 apartment houses, 163 condominium ownership apartments, and 26 cooperative ownership apartments). The 13 apartment houses other than condominium and cooperative ownership apartments should have been included with the commercial properties in the tax impact shift analysis.
“… the effective tax rate for residences was 1.1% of capital value, 98% [sic] for commercial properties but 3% for condominiums/cooperatives/apartment houses.” (Page 5, paragraph 2)
Comment: There is an obvious typographical error where the commercial class must be at .98%, not 98%. There is a strong possibility that the indicated difference in the condominiums/ cooperatives/ apartment houses from the residential or other commercial property is based on value assumption derived with a methodology bias (i.e., income approach not intended for this purpose v. sales comparison approach) rather than a “level-playing field” indicator of market value. The details of the appraisals used to support the value conclusions is necessary before any credibility can be given to the espoused impacts indicated.
“The data was also analyzed by value range. …we documented the existence of a significant and regressive tax burden. The higher value properties were assessed at lower effective tax rates that [sic] [than] lower valued properties. The results of the present study confirm this. The properties in the two and one half million dollar and above category will experience an average tax increase of 26% while properties in the lowest two value ranges will have small average tax decreases. (Page 6, paragraph 3)
“The graph in Exhibit 5A … shows that there is considerable horizontal inequity… looking at the properties selling at approximately $1.4 million dollars, we can observe a ratio of the new tax bill to the current tax bill varies from .8 to 1.6 (a decrease ranging from 20% to an increase up to 60%).” (Page 6, paragraph 3)
Comment: Although general, this is one of the clearest conclusions of Mr. Eckert’s limited “impact” study. There is very limited value in periodically updating the impact study until all the data is collected and edited. Historically under-assessed properties will experience larger than average increases in assessment in proportion to the degree to which they had been previously under assessed.
“The current study reflects the data that was provided … by the village …. Additional information particularly for the commercial class could change these results significantly.” (Page 7, paragraph 3)
Comment: This impact study provides little or no new reliable information.
If there are any further questions, please let me know. Thank You.
Sincerely,
Bruce W. Sauter Assessment Administration Specialist (AAS) Real Property Assessment and Valuation Consultant
[1] Confidence intervals at the 90% confidence level and 85% confidence level would become even larger intervals
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Letter from Elisabeth S. Harding
39 Homesdale Road, Bronxville, N. Y. 10708
November 28, 2005
Mayor Mary Marvin, Trustees Glenn Bellito, Ann Poorman, Frank Sica, and Robert Underhill
Village of Bronxville 200 Pondfield Road Bronxville, N.Y. 10708
Dear Mayor and Trustees,
I am writing to request that you immediately stop any work on Village records being performed by Daniel Whittemore, Dipak Pandya, and Anthony Fabrisio who are all Town of Greenburgh employees. The way these individuals were hired is very questionable. Also, the work, at best, is unnecessary. At worst, these people may be altering documents that will be needed as evidence in case of future litigation involving Bronxville’s former assessor, Mr. Robert Balog. I also request that you not allow Mr. Gerry Iagallo or Mr. David Wilkes to have any part in the Bronxville reassessment process.
On April 27, 2005, the Town of Greenburgh’s Board passed the first of numerous resolutions authorizing the hiring of Mr. Balog to do appraisal work for the Town. (See Attachment A). At that time, Mr. Balog was still the assessor for Bronxville but his assessment practices had been called into question. Among the many irregularities in his record keeping were his frequent failure to enter dates that assessments were changed and some instances in which those dates were postdated or predated. At the June 13, 2005, Bronxville Trustees meeting, the Trustees accepted Mr. Balog’s letter of resignation. (See Attachment B). Mr. Balog cited changes in “the requirements on his time” as the reason for his resignation. At the same meeting, Mr. Porr, the Village’s administrator, announced that he had placed an ad for a replacement for Mr. Balog in various professional publications. (See Attachment C). This advertisement was placed without any public discussion by the Trustees of the ideal structure for the assessor’s office, what type of individual should be hired, or any other issues regarding the role of the assessor. Although the position was supposed to be for an interim assessor, the advertisement makes no mention of that.
During the summer months Mr. Balog continued to do appraisal work for the town of Greenburgh. (See Attachment D). Meanwhile, Mr. Iagallo, the Assessor for the Town of Greenburgh, applied for the position of Bronxville Assessor, a position he would undertake in addition to his duties in Greenburgh and various other municipalities. In the middle of August, Mayor Marvin convened a special 7:00 A.M. meeting of the Bronxville Board of Trustees in part because of the urgency of approving a contract with the Michaelean Institute at Pace University. Among other areas of study, the Institute agreed to provide a review of the proper structure for the Bronxville Assessor’s office along with cost estimates for various functions. (See attachment E). According to the discussion at that meeting, the work was supposed to be completed by the end of November 2005.
At the Village’s September 12, 2005, Board meeting, the Trustees appointed Mr. Iagallo, who is still the Assessor in Greenburgh, to be the Bronxville Assessor.
At the October 10, 2005, Trustees meeting, Mayor Marvin announced that the section of the Michaelean Institute study relating to the functioning of the assessor’s office would not be completed until February. (This is apparently because the contract was not signed until early October.) The Trustees also approved the hiring of three Town of Greenburgh employees to perform various record keeping tasks connected with the Bronxville tax records. (See attachment F). These are individuals who work for Mr. Iagallo in Greenburgh where they will keep their full time positions. They were apparently hired without any job openings being posted and with no public discussion by the Trustees of whether the work needs to be done or whether the rates of pay are appropriate. (They are each being paid about $60 an hour which translates to $124,800 per year for a forty hour week). The letter contracts with two of these individuals provide for no cap on the amount of hours worked.
So far, there has also been no public discussion of whether or not it is advisable to have new employees with no track record with the Village working on sensitive records during nights and weekends with no supervision. After the November 14, 2005, Trustee’s meeting I asked Mr. Porr whether these new employees had keys to Village Hall. He responded that they do not, that other people let them in. He stated that they are not in Village Hall unsupervised but was unable to tell me who supervises them. He then said that they take their work away with them. This means that important Village records are being removed from Village Hall.
Given the level of controversy surrounding Bronxille’s tax practices, it is extraordinary that the Village would hire as an assessor someone who must work cooperatively with Mr. Balog elsewhere. It is even more extraordinary that the Village would then hire three of that person’s employees to work on the Village’s tax records. The idea that Bronxville tax records are being removed from Village Hall by these Greenburgh employees when Mr. Balog works in Greenburgh is also extremely disturbing.
At a minimum, the bulk of the work the three October hires are doing is a waste of money. One individual, Mr. Whittemore, is supposed to be going through the Village’s building department records in order to gather data to put on the backs of the property cards. Given that the Village must do a complete reassessment in the very immediate future with a completely new data collection, this is a waste of time. In any event, because Mr. Balog had a contract with the Village to do this work, and was paid, the Village should be getting reimbursement from Mr. Balog, through a legal action if necessary. In addition, setting up a new record keeping system is premature because the Village has not received the results of the Michaelean Institute study and has not had any public discussion of what type of system would be best and ultimately most cost-effective. Another individual, Mr. Pandya, is entering the Village’s assessment and tax rolls on his own computer system. This should be done on the Village’s system. The third individual, Mr. Fabrisio, is supposed to be collecting information for an impact study on the effects of revaluation on residential taxpayers. This is also a waste of money because as part of the process of revaluation the same data will have to be collected again.
The activities of Mr. Iagallo and Mr. Wilkes in Greenburgh are best described in a series of newspaper articles in The Journal News and The Scarsdale Inquirer. (See attachment G). It is enough to point out that the credibility of the Bronxville real property tax system cannot be restored by people with poor judgment. The Village should only hire people who are able to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.
It should be particularly clear in the post-Katrina world that cronyism leads to bad results. The bad results here are multiple. There is the waste of public funds. There is the risk that unsupervised part time employees may be altering records that document the activities of a former employee who Mayor Marvin acknowledges followed illegal tax assessment practices. And, finally, there are the continuing questions about the credibility of Bronxville’s tax system.
Very truly yours,
Elisabeth S. Harding
Cc: Mr. Gerry Iagallo; Mr. David Wilkes; Members of the Bronxville School Board of Education; The Bronxville Bulletin; The New York Times; The Journal News; The Town Report; Members, Nonpartisan Committee for Fair Bronxville Taxes.
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Text of Bronxville Trustee Glenn Bellitto’s Statement on
Revaluation Read at the September 12, 2005, Trustee’s Meeting
Property Tax Revaluation
As the Trustee Liaison to the Assessor, I’d like to speak for a couple of minutes about my personal views on the Tax Assessment Issue …
After a thorough Village discussion of all options during the next few weeks, I think that a Village-wide reassessment of property will be one of the most-compelling courses of action available to us.
When I think of Bronxville, I think, first and foremost, of community – a collection of people bound together by common interests and common responsibilities. And the document that binds our community together financially is the tax roll. When that tax roll loses its integrity in the eyes of the citizens, the compact that binds us all together is severely compromised.
The Eckert report states that taxes in Bronxville are unfairly distributed, with higher-priced homes paying proportionately less in taxes than lower-priced ones. There are also wide variations in tax rates for similarly priced homes.
Yet, for me, the 600 pieces of straw that broke the camel’s back were the 600 properties that were reassessed by Eastchester, but not by Bronxville, over the past 10 years. The sheer volume of properties not reassessed is staggering, and the lack of documentation about much of the decision-making processes is remarkable.
Most alternatives to a Village-wide assessment seem either bleak or remote. To do nothing would be unacceptable because it would continue significant unfairness. To adopt the Bronxville portion of the Eastchester Town Roll would be problematic. Per the Eckert report, the Bronxville portion of the Eastchester Town Tax Roll has a significantly higher Coefficient of Dispersion than our own roll. To adopt a Town roll that is less equitable than our own would serve no logical purpose.
So where do we go from here? I think that the Mayor and we Trustees have a pretty good road map for the prospective decision-making process. Hopefully, we will hire Dr. Eckert to do an impact study, a Part 2, to what will be distributed tonight. As the Mayor has mentioned, we have already commissioned the Michaelian Institute to investigate such issues as the pros and cons of giving our tax assessment function over to the Town of Eastchester, either post or prior reassessment, to recommend optimal staffing for our Village Assessor’s office, and to delineate best practices of record-keeping for property information.
I would like to go into a little detail about my hopes for the proposed impact study by Dr. Eckert. Although the tax effect of a reassessment to the Village as a whole would be 0, I think it’s safe to say that there will be some changes to most people’s taxes and drastic changes to some people’s taxes, both up and down. We have to try to help answer for residents the very natural and human question of “How is tax fairness going to affect me?”
What I would like to see Dr. Eckert do is to fashion a financial model, so that people would know, post re-assessment, about how much in taxes houses valued at $1 million, $2 million, $3 million and so on, as well as what various townhouses, would pay. As a former president of a Bronxville co-op board, I’m also very interested in seeing how much co-ops, as well as what other New York State-classified commercial properties would pay, both with and without the Homestead Option.
As we move along with this corrective decision-making, I think that we, as a community, all need to keep in mind that quantitative analyses and coefficients of dispersion eventually all have very human faces. I can imagine a young couple with children who may now live in one of the highly-taxed 1960’s split levels say that with double digit school tax increases during the past few years, they thought that they would no longer be able to afford to live in Bronxville. A Village wide tax reassessment might lower their taxes enough so that they could stay. Conversely, I can easily imagine a senior citizen that, post reassessment, might be forced to sell her old home on The Hilltop because of higher taxes.
Although a tax reassessment would almost certainly be done all at one time, I think that one thing we would want to consider as a community would be whether the changes in property taxes should take effect all at once, or maybe be phased in over a 2 or 3 year period, to give residents more time for financial planning, as well as to possibly help stabilize the real estate market.
We would also need to have a thorough Village conversation concerning the level of detail we would want in a reassessment, along with its concomitant costs. I think that a community like ours would demand and deserve a world-class process. Further ahead, would be decisions regarding how we would keep the roll up-to-date so that we would never fall into this problem again, as well as what would be the optimal staffing for the Assessor’s office.
I would hope that, by December, the results of the rest of the studies would be available to all, and that citizens would have had enough time to voice their opinions at Trustee meetings on reassessment and any other alternatives that they would like to suggest, so that there could be a formal Board vote on reassessment by year-end.
The road to tax fairness that we continue to travel together on is not easy. But, I know that, as a community, we will recognize that it is in all of our best interests to face our joint responsibilities forthrightly, so as to make our compact with each other both fairer and stronger.
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INTRODUCTION TO REAL PROPERTY TAXES by Betsy Harding
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