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Vets must wait for school tax break

Enactment postponed until 2015-16

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Nassau County veterans who thought they would see their school taxes reduced in 2014-15 have another think coming. Though dozens of school boards around the county voted in recent weeks to ease veterans’ tax burdens, the county’s Department of Assessment has postponed enactment of the tax breaks until 2015-16.

The East Rockaway school district passed the measure. Lynbrook did not.

Veterans living in New York have for years been eligible for state, county, town and village tax exemptions. Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed legislation last Dec. 18 giving school boards the option to offer exemptions as well. Those exemptions reduce the assessed value of veterans’ homes, lowering their school taxes. There are three categories of exemptions: wartime veteran in a non-combat zone, wartime veteran in a combat zone and wartime veteran in a combat zone with disability.

Thirty-eight of Nassau County’s 54 school districts approved veterans’ tax exemptions this year, according to Brian Nevin, a county spokesman.

An April 1 letter signed by Nassau Acting Assessor James Davis, which the Department of Assessment emailed to school district officials around the county, informed them that there was a Jan. 2 deadline for approving veterans tax exemptions — a deadline that no district met. The letter contradicted an email the department sent to school officials on Jan. 8, which stated that a school board resolution adopting the exemptions “must be transmitted to the Nassau County Department of Assessment no later than March 15, 2014, to be effective for the 2014-15 school year,” according to a knowledgeable source.

Nevin said that state law mandated that the county use Jan. 2 as the deadline. “The assessor simply complies with state law,” he wrote in an email. “It’s a state law that dictates the regulations.”

The law that Cuomo signed, an amendment to the tax code, did not set a date by which school boards had to act. In his letter, Davis wrote that the state Department of Taxation and Finance had ruled that the county must use the Jan. 2 deadline.

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