Recently, I gave the order to post online tax-impact notices using last year’s tax levy and the new assessed market values for property owners across Nassau County. Throughout my first 11 months in office, I have been warned by many that the county’s assessment system is the third rail of Nassau politics. By pushing out the data online and to homeowners’ mailboxes by Dec. 1, I was walking a political tightrope. I hear and see the warning signals, but when I ran for office, I promised that I would fix the assessment mess. I plan to fulfill that promise.
Earlier this year, the County Legislature joined me to complete Nassau’s first reassessment since 2011. Our property assessments were wildly inaccurate and unfair, and this broken system was plunging the county deeper and deeper into debt. After eight years of frozen assessments and mass settlements under the Mangano administration, the assessed value of Class 1 residential properties countywide fell by about 33 percent — while in the real world, on the market, home prices steadily climbed.
Half of Nassau County’s property owners were paying more than their fair share, in effect subsidizing the other half. The loss of assessed value year after year drove up tax rates for school districts and other taxing jurisdictions. Now we have new, accurate market values, and the good news is that our homes are more valuable than they were 10 years ago.
I want to be straight with taxpayers. About half of the county’s property owners will see a decrease in their taxes, while the other half will see increases. To mitigate the impact of those increases, I am putting forth a Taxpayer Protection Plan.
I agree with the County Legislature’s majority that homeowners should not be expected to absorb significant assessment increases all at once. But we disagree on the best way to achieve this. The GOP majority’s plan to keep Mangano’s Class 1 level of assessment will not get us to tax accuracy and fairness for more than 50 years. That’s right — it would take over half a century to get to the correct numbers under their plan, and we would continue to lose grievance claims en masse, and accumulate more debt.