Text size:

Nassau's taxing issues continue for Massapequa family

Joye Brown

September 18, 2008

Doug Amante of Massapequa must be feeling a bit snakebit right now.

First, the assessment on his remodeled home tripled his taxes, in part because somebody in the assessors' office made a dumb mistake.

That got fixed.

But come next month, his mortgage company is going to get an incorrect tax bill for his home, followed by a second, correct one.

Joye Brown Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

Why?

Because of another dumb mistake in the assessors' office.

Still, there's good rising from Amante's misfortune:

The Nassau County assessors' office is changing how it calculates assessments on homes undergoing construction or remodeling.

It's also reviewing a list of 720 other residential properties - provided to Newsday via a Freedom of Information request - that, like Amante's, were assessed under a "construction-cost-based" formula rather than by fair market value.

But first, let's jump back to August, when Newsday first wrote about Amante's plight.

And pause for a moment to remember - again - that an assessment doesn't raise property taxes.

Tax increases do.

An assessment determines only what share of the total tax burden a property owner will bear.

Amante's burden got really heavy after the office changed his assessment. It did so after determining that Amante was building a new home - when in fact his Oyster Bay town building permit was for a second-story addition.

And that's where Dumb Mistake No. 1 comes in.

Although the office had a copy of Amante's permit, somebody marked a box for new construction in the office computer.

The error caused Amante's mortgage bank to hike his monthly payments from $2,800 to $4,500 to cover his increased share.

Amante, a father of three, feared his family would lose their home. But after Newsday stepped in, the soon-to-be-retiring Assessor Harvey Levinson asked the Assessment Review Commission to lower Amante's assessment.

It did.

The commission approved a $2,700 refund on Amante's 2007-2008 property tax bill.