A few weeks back I cut
short a day of work to make the 5 hour round-trip to Bolivar in Allegany County
to contest my camp’s assessed value during the town’s Grievance Day. Despite
being on a remote seasonal road, a mile and a half from electricity, and having
no structures on the land, my assessment doubled while the assessor estimated that
my taxes will rise by more than half.
Last week, my travels and
efforts proved all for naught: A care package came in the mail from Bolivar
officials saying my grievance was denied and that they would stick with their
initial findings.
The frustration that I’ve
had over this brings to the surface the vast unfairness that is inherent to New
York’s property model.
Spend some time mulling
over these questions…
Why should senior citizens
on fixed incomes who have been paying into the system their whole adult lives
continue to pay high taxes for things they won’t use anymore, but once did and
once paid for accordingly through taxation at that time?
In comparing properties of
equal size, why should a childless couple pay as much as a family of four, when
the family of four consumes far more in public services (especially public
schooling)?
Why should someone who
loves his home and wants to make it better with a swimming pool, patio or an
addition have to suffer the consequences at reassessment and end up paying more
in taxes than someone who left his land idle?
In rural locales like
Niagara County, why should farmers carry the highest portion of the revenue
burden just because they happen to own vast tracks of land? Are they receiving
a proportionate amount of services?
Why should property owners
pay so much for Medicaid (in most New York locales it’s 52 to 64 percent of the
county tax) when it should be the obligation of the population as a whole to
fund this forced benevolence deemed to be so necessary?
How is it just that
municipalities and schools in Allegany County and the Adirondacks can reap
revenues from who are basically absentee landowners living elsewhere (camp
owners) who come to town just a few weekends and weeks a year and acquire
almost no benefit from the taxes they’ve paid? Why should those non-resident
property owners be excluded from having a vote in how their taxes are being
used in the places where they are paying them?
Beyond those glaring
displays of wrong, consider the very act of property taxation itself. You are
led to believe – and even possess legal documents that show as much – that you
own your property. You really don’t; ownership is only theoretical. It’s more accurately
stated that you are renting the property from your local governments and school
districts at a premium, because, if you didn’t pay your taxes it wouldn’t take
long for that governing body to take that property from you --- even if the
mortgage was fully paid-for. How is that fair? It would be no different than
someone taxing your savings account – after all, it is property, isn’t it?
This travesty carries
special meaning in New York State, where property taxes are 57% above the
national average. Across America people think of their property taxes in terms
of hundreds of dollars; here, we think of them in thousands of dollars.
Let’s look at one of the extremes. One
of my clients from Tennessee pays a paltry $660 per year in property taxes for his
2,800-square-foot suburban new-build. In comparison, my coworker who lives in
North Tonawanda has a similar home for which he pays $6,800 in taxes annually. We’re
talking magnitudes of difference in taxes paid.
New York’s cure for this
problem was not to cut property taxes, but rather to still allow them to grow,
but only at a supposedly-stunted rate (the 2 percent tax cap). That’s still a
princely sum: Crunch the numbers of what would become of your taxes after just
5 years of capped increases.
The extreme view would see
property taxes abolished. We know that will never happen. But, a myriad of
changes could be accomplished to mitigate the unfairness of property taxes in
the Empire State. Just a few of those ideas discussed in this column over the past
12 years: replace the state’s Medicaid program with an HMO-driven voucher
system; utilize clawbacks on businesses that break their promises to IDAs;
utilize assessment caps and adjust assessments to true market value (how in the
world did assessments go up during the Great Recession?); and add another 1 to
1.5 percent on sales taxes across the state to use a fairer consumption-driven
tax to decrease property owners’ contributions to Medicaid.
Those are all common sense
measures that could cut back on some of the unfairness and princely sums that
are inherent to our property taxes. But, instead, it seems like the state
legislature, Governor and local governments prefer to maintain that air of
unfairness, taking advantages of citizens and businesses alike, further damning
the once proud Empire State.
From the 26 June 2017 Greater Niagara Newspapers
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