County Executive Curran picks new assessor

Nassau County Executive Laura Curran has chosen a new assessor to run the beleaguered department that county officials have long said accounts for many of Nassau’s financial problems.

David Moog of Sunnyside, Queens, was approved on June 4 by the Nassau County Legislative Rules Committee and must be approved by the full Legislature at its June 18 meeting.

“Mr. Moog has the experience and qualifications necessary to push forward with fixing the county’s broken assessment system that robs taxpayers of $100 million every year,” Curran said in a statement.

Moog has worked as a certified assessor in New York City, where he negotiates contracts and agreements for accountants and other professionals, according to his resume. Before that, he was Local 1757 president, representing more than 120 city assessors at the city’s finance department, tax commission and law department. There, he wrote and pushed for successful legislation requiring professional training and certification of assessors in New York City, according to his resume.

Moog has a Master of Public Administration and Financial Management from Baruch College and a Bachelor of Finance and Public Administration from the New York University College of Business.

If approved, Moog would oversee a departmental overhaul that Curran has said would include the reassessment of all properties in the county by the time a new tentative tax roll is issued on Jan. 1, 2019. His salary would be $165,000 a year.

The full reassessment would build on an already completed review of county values by two outside appraisal firms.

On June 1, Hempstead Town’s receiver of taxes, Don Clavin, publicly questioned a policy change at the county level that halted the mailing of tentative assessed value notices to residents each January. Clavin accused Curran of making the decision to subtly discourage residents from grieving their taxes by the March 1 deadline. Curran declined comment for this story.

When asked about notices going out in the future, under the new assessor, a county spokeswoman said, “New disclosure notices will be sent in October or early November which will reflect the values set by the tax roll that was unfrozen by County Executive Curran.”

Former County Executive Ed Mangano froze the tax rolls for four years, shortly after taking office in January 2010, in an attempt, he said, to stop the widespread over-assessments that led to grievances, and millions of dollars in refunds to property owners.

Asked whether under the new assessor the county would continue accepting property-tax grievances during the re-assessment overhaul, Curran said, “Of course.”

“No resident should ever ignore their right to grieve, and Nassau County will never take that right away,” Curran said in an emailed statement. “The goal is to have a fair and defensible tax roll.”