Reassess The Reassessment

Need For Change In System, Decrease In Spending, Is Key To Lower Taxes

From the Opinions page, Newsday, October 26, 2007:

Editorial: Hold hearings on Nassau reassessment

Surely reassessment needs to be reassessed. What Nassau County's complex and cumbersome process doesn't need is to be crudely politicized. Yet that is what Nassau Republicans are trying to do this election season, with their false promise that a five-year freeze on assessments will lower property taxes.

The Democrats can't totally escape blame, either. They used the same cynical tactic back in 2003, in successfully defeating the GOP assessor. And the ruling Democratic Party should have acknowledged much earlier the need for a full airing of all the complaints about errors in the process and the unpredictability of bills. The skyrocketing housing market of the past few years, combined with the clumsily implemented massive reassessment ordered by the courts in 2000 (to correct decades of unfair taxing when the county was controlled by the GOP), created this mess.

Freezing assessments won't lower taxes. Decreased spending by school districts will lower taxes. In the Uniondale school district, where houses are reassessed by the same county system, taxes this year are going up a dollar or two at most. That's because the school district produced a no-increase budget. And if the state's STAR rebate program were applied directly to this year's bill - instead of arriving through the mail as a check, in an election-year stunt - the tax bills in most districts would actually be lower.

The county assessor, Harvey Levinson, has already made some improvements. The Ohio firm hired by the previous assessor to conduct the colossal re-evaluation of the tax rolls is being phased out; a local team is likely to make fewer errors. And homeowners will now be promptly notified of the result of their challenge to the previous year's assessment. Before, owners were forced to file annual challenges by March 1 without knowing whether they'd won or lost last year's case. And now, if they win, the result will be immediately corrected on the current roll. The pingpong game should end.

After the election, the county legislature owes it to the taxpayers to conduct full hearings to make sure the system is working better. Unfortunately, honest talk about assessment doesn't fit into sound bites or political mailings. The only way to reduce taxes is to stop spending or find a municipal money tree. Anyone who promises anything else will also try to sell you a bridge.

Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc