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GREENBURGH, N.Y. – For the first time in more than half a century, Greenburgh homeowners may be getting a property value adjustment.
Town Supervisor Paul Feiner said last week that the town is taking steps to perform a property revaluation, which would be Greenburgh’s first since the mid-1950s.
“We’re not playing games,” Feiner said Thursday in a meeting with Edgemont community leaders. “We said we’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it.”
Designed to reassess properties throughout the town and reset them to more fairly reflect current market values, a revaluation is typically expected to increase one-third of taxpayers' bills, maintain one-third where they are and slightly decrease the remaining third.
The hope is that doing a revaluation would help limit the millions of dollars the town and the school and fire districts lose every year in tax certiorari refunds – reimbursements paid to property owners who challenged their assessments.
“Doing this, it would stop the bleeding,” Feiner said.
The supervisor said he has been in talks with Yonkers Mayor Mike Spano about the possibility of conducting a joint revaluation. Feiner said working with Yonkers could shave as much as 15 percent off the town’s costs, which he estimated could be around $4 million.
The supervisor is also planning to send letters this week to nearly every municipality in Westchester County, urging them to undertake the process at the same time.
A group effort may even persuade the reluctant county government to hop on board, Feiner said, and lessen the fear of political consequences for local officials who push the process forward.
“If Greenburgh and Yonkers do this, it would put the pressure on everyone else and would make it less of a political issue,” he said.
Two municipalities, Rye and Pelham, have reassessed in the past two years. A few, including Mamaroneck, are pushing ahead, but many other municipalities have not reassessed properties in decades, giving Westchester County some of the most out-of-date assessments in the state.
At a community forum last week, Edgemont residents urged the town to undertake the process as quickly as possible.
“Reassessment is killing my school district and hurting me indirectly in my pocketbook,” civic leader Bob Bernstein said at the forum, noting that school taxes make up 60 percent of his tax bill.
But it may be awhile before Greenburgh’s revaluation actually happens, Town Assessor Edye McCarthy warned. She said her office currently has only PDF and paper documents, and would have to digitize the town’s data before the process could begin.
“We have been working, really hard, but it’s been slow,” she said.
Comments (11)
hal - you have just made it clear that in addition to being a terrible manager, feiner deserves an "F" in logic. as you correctly observed, if you oppose all the feinerist thinking, that doesnt make you wrong. in fact, given his history, it makes you a sage.
twenty years at the helm where he runs without opposition has left us with an arrogant pandering
Romneyesque character (meaning, one who will do anything to get elected) in charge of town government.
one would think that Feiner would have learned something about following the law after the Fortress Bible case, but true to form, Feiner recently violated your constitutional rights at a recent town board meeting.
sadly, feiner, like the town's departments, lacks internal controls.
Paul, you had the opportunity to work together on WestHelp and chose not to. Remember my entreaty to you that you not disregard the other constiutent groups? Broader inclusion would have gone a long way towards improving relationships with different groups, but you chose the action that you thought deliver the most votes for your upcoming campaigns. You are reaping the seeds you sowed.
-Terry Williams
If anyone is against everything that Mr. Feiner is for, does that make them any more wrong than, assuming that everything Feiner is for, is right? Furthermore, in being wrong so often, Feiner has the collusion of Town resources underwritten by taxpayers; this makes his choices of action (or inaction) even more puzzling.
Hal Samis
other than being a poster child for term limits or edgemont incorporation, mr feiner's record is deplorable. he acted illegally and unconstitutionally in the fortress bible and valhalla cases, he has acted with extreme financial recklessness in the Westhelp ($800,000 in losses and counting) and the tree case (town vastly underinsured) as well as negligently in failing to maintain the town's infrastructure and visual appearance (including that ugly wall central avenue in front of webb field), with indifference to the campaign finance laws (see judy beville) and with complete indifference to the tax cert problem caused by his failure to conduct a revaluation which is significantly damaging the town's school districts. And this is just the short list.
bob and hal are right. they should be against everything feiner is for because feiner is a clear and present danger to the town and its taxpayers. the only way to work with him is finding him work outside of government. maybe some of his development benefactors have an opening?
Paul Feiner just doesn't seem to get it. He claims I'm against everything he's for, and for everything he's against, but if I read his public comments correctly, we're both FOR reassessment, the only difference being that many of us in Edgemont are frustrated by his lack of leadership on an issue that is of tremendous importance to the largest component of our property tax bill, which is our school taxes. And Mr. Feiner is hardly one to complain about a failure to work together. He specifically asked last year that the ECC draft a resolution supporting tax reassessment and we did exactly what he asked -- I'm the guy who wrote it -- only to find that Mr. Feiner dropped the ball and did nothing with it, which is what we've come to expect from Mr. Feiner and what it means to "work together" with him.
So too we find that whenever the goes gets tough, and Mr. Feiner faces criticism for the many financial problems he has created for the Town, be it Fortress Bible, the WestHELP fiasco, the water department debacle and the Dromore Road fiasco, to name just a few, Mr. Feiner's response is not to apologize for his mistakes, or try to do better, but rather to launch personal attacks against his critics, myself included. This lack of maturity on the part of an elected official who has spent his entire adult life in public office seems to be a problem peculiar to Mr. Feiner, which is especially unfortunate for us and for the Town, because we in Edgemont have no problem dealing with our elected officials at the county level, be they Democrat or Republican, or at the state level with state senator Andrea Stewart Cousins.
Bob & Hal are against everything I'm for. And, for everything I'm against. It's frustrating. Wouldn't we all be better off if we'd try to work together?
hal - just disable that feature
your idea for a reassessment on sale is sound even though its a bit of rough justice.
on the downside its a bit of a welcome stranger and it will allow smarter buyers to factor that in to the sale price (today seller's just say the taxes can or are being grieved).
of course, once the taxes are revised after the sale the buyer can file a grievance.
Mr. Feiner may say he's not playing games, but residents of Edgemont may have reason to disagree. First of all, Mr. Feiner has been promising reassessment for years now. In fact, he made it the centerpiece of his 2011 budget -- two years ago in October 2010 -- but allocated no money toward the effort in either 2011 or again this year in 2012, and when his town-wide committee unanimously recommended it two years ago, he promptly appointed a new committee of residents from Irvington who are opposed to revaluation presumably to come with a different recommendation, which if it's ever been completed, has never been released. In the meantime, while other municipalities such as Scarsdale and Mamaroneck are moving ahead on their own with reassessment, Mr. Feiner seems to find new excuses not to proceed, whether it's because he wants to "condition" reassessment on the willingness of Yonkers and other municipalities to "partner" with Greenburgh in reducing costs or because he wants to "condition" reassessment on ability to the Town to reduce adverse financial impacts by shifting the burdens on those who will have to pay more to those burdened taxpayers who've been subsidizing them, because he feels the county should assume responsibility for the effort.
Two weeks ago, the chairman of the county board of legislators, Ken Jenkins, said the county had supplied the county's municipalities with 75% of the data they need to conduct their own reassessments. Yet, when told this was the case, town tax assessor Edye McCarthy said it didn't matter because the Town couldn't use the data until the Town's data became "digitized" and because no money has been asked for or allocated for that effort, Mr. Feiner has managed to come up with yet another excuse for not doing reassessment any time soon - even when the county steps up to help.
Edgemont residents saw that 40% of their school tax increase this year was because of tax cert obligations and the overall reduction in assessed property valuations in Edgemont. Edgemont is, of course, not the only school and fire district in the Town that is losing millions of dollars annually by the failure of the Town's elected officials to take the lead in getting reassessment underway. Schools and fire districts can't legally do reassessment on their own. The Town's villages can legally do reassessment but because school districts overlap into the unincorporated areas of the Town, village reassessment won't solve their problem.
But unlike every other taxing entity in Greenburgh, Edgemont is the only school and fire district that can legally solve this problem on its own -- but only by incorporating as a village. This is because Edgemont's school and fire districts would have the same borders as an incorporated village of Edgemont. If Mr. Feiner's promises of reassessment "on the horizon" continue to be empty and disingenuous, Edgemont may find that incorporation is the only way to save itself from the financial destruction that the Town's failure to do reassessment on its own is creating for us.
Hal. That is the most ridiculous bunch of crap I've ever heard. you need to get off the "Bashing Feiner" train and come back to the real world. Westchester county pays the highest property taxes in the nation....period...and it's not justified at all. we need a reassessment to make them more fair and current to today's market values. how about this? i'll take my reassessment which will equate to my property taxes being lowered by almost a 3rd and you can just go on paying whatever your paying and continue to be happy with it.
Reviewing reveals that "reveal" appearing instead of "reval" was the result of an insistent Apple default spell check substitution.
While not Feiner's words, the "horizon" is an IMAGINARY line where the earth meets the sky. And the closer you get to where it appeared to be, it moves away just as far. That is the story of Feiner and revaluation/reassessment. Perhaps needless to comment is that Feiner is seeking to prolong the "evitable" by clouding the waters by writing to every Westchester community to join with him in seeking reveal at one time. Presumably this includes those that have had it done recently or are already underway.
What basis does Feiner have to suggest a savings of 15% as cited by "discussions" with Yonkers?
Sounds good but, like most of Feiner's mouthings, based on nothing and somehow I don't see the Villages or Edgemont sharing the same bed with Yonkers.
How does reveal stop certiorari? If an occupied commercial building were newly assessed and the day after became vacant for a long time, say hello again to certiorari.
And the oft cited 1/3-1/3-1/3 rule assumes that NO one's property has gone up in value or that the lower third will go down resulting in lower taxes? And that the larger middle third will remain the same? Meeting a higher tax burden is the unstated goal and that alone invokes higher valuations for all in the family.
If any property is going to reflect market values, it would be hard to imagine that there are lower values than those in effect from the last reassessment done over 50 years ago.
Then too, the Assessor's office claim of being backed up digitizing is another mountain standing in the way. An effort to overcome which depends on the effort of visiting interns to correct. Not unlike the results still not witnessed at the Courts from interns processing tickets. Talk, talk, talk...no reward.
But every time reveal/reassessment comes up; the Town continues to ignore the fastest, the simplest and cheapest method of doing so. A method that needs NYS approval to be exempt from State laws that determine the process. A method that could be used were Greenburgh to seek the same exemption that NYC has in place and, I think, some upstate communities have adopted. A method that could rely on asking Abinanti to write a new bill for Legislature passage -- the same process that is being cheered by Feiner to accommodate the tennis bubble at Town Park.
Reassess on sale! No Assessor's Department necessary, just a hand held calculator.
NYC reassesses at 45% of the sales price (what better gauge of value?); the result phased in over 5 years (20% per year) but it could be 7, 10, 20 whatever. If the property is not sold, it is not reassessed thus causing no hardship for those who don't have the realized profits from sale proceeds --Note: if you sold, you no longer pay property taxes; the buyer does. Properties do turn over and with the passage of time the tax roll would reflect the market price in an impartial manner -- simple math not perceived and subjective choices and the judgement call of an Assessor.
However, whatever method is followed, any method is better than the current no method. And doing nothing is what Feiner does best simply because once you've done it there are no more headlines and photos to be garnered from the topic.
Hal Samis