Sunday, November 15, 2026
In an unprecedented move, numerous town supervisors throughout Suffolk County came together at a news conference recently, calling on the State to weaken the 2 percent property tax cap by allowing governments to increase their spending and tax rates above 2 percent if inflation is running high.
Taxpayers must say no to this attempt to make it easier to pierce the cap.
The cap was put into effect in 2011, to force schools and local governments to prioritize their spending and prevent tax increases above 2 percent, regardless of whether the inflation rate exceeds that level. Lawmakers decided to make it a hard cap because taxes had been growing out of control on Long Island. Before the cap came into effect, the average school tax increase was 6 percent. It shrank to 2 percent in the years after the cap was enacted.
The cap wasn’t a panacea, and taxes continued to rise, but at a much lower rate than they would have otherwise.
Long Island is one of the most highly taxed areas in the nation, and it’s these confiscatory taxes that are a prime reason why New York has lost more residents to less expensive areas than just about any other region.
The cap law allows municipalities and schools to pierce the cap, but only with a 60 percent vote. Supervisors and school boards don’t like the idea of having to present a budget that pierces the cap because of the optics involved. But we say, that’s why they pay you the big bucks; it comes with the territory. Our local leaders have to put their big boy and big girl pants on and make tough decisions.
Some of the supervisors were saying it’s an impossibility to stay within the cap. No, it’s not. It just requires some tough decision-making. Eliminate many of the town patronage jobs, consolidate agencies and play tougher with the unions in negotiations.
We do, however, sympathize with the local officials and schools in that the mandates emanating from Albany are indeed crushing. State legislators and the governor have the luxury of creating additional programs and bragging about what they’ll do for New Yorkers, while often leaving the bill for local governments to pick up.
This hypocrisy was highlighted last year, when the Legislature removed the fiscal safeguards in the Tier 6 pension program and allowed government employees hired after 2012 to pay less into their pension systems, retire earlier and factor more overtime into their pension calculations. Pundits warned that it would cause great strain on local property taxes. We were ignored.
Funny, we don’t remember any of these supervisors speaking out against those Tier 6 reforms when they were proposed last year. Perhaps they were worried about ticking off the unions.
Yet we agree with the supervisors that something must be done to curb these mandates.
We would suggest that instead of their proposing a watering-down of the cap that protects taxpayers, they instead focus their attention on legislation that would prohibit new mandates unless the state paid 100 percent of the bill.
Gov. Kathy Hochul was quick to slap down this recommended change in the law. We think that’s a good thing, but we have to laugh at the irony. While Hochul is glad to heap more mandates on the locals without picking up the tab, she has no desire to put a 2 percent cap on state spending.
As the Center for Cost Effective Government has said in the past, if the state had placed the cap on its own spending in 2012, when it forced it on towns and schools, the budget would be $100 billion lower today than it is.
There’s a great deal of hypocrisy, and plenty of blame to go around. It certainly is unfair for local legislators to have to deal with these mandates, and they have a right to speak out, but they’re going down the wrong road. They should stop trying to weaken the cap so they can spend and tax more. Instead they should focus on the mandates and getting the state to foot the bill.
Stop asking the taxpayers to pay more.
Steve Levy is executive director of the Center for Cost Effective Government, a fiscally conservative think tank. He has served as Suffolk County executive, as a state assemblyman and as host of the podcast “On the Right Side.”
