Brown: Nassau County needs full-time assessor

Laura Curran, Nassau County’s top elected official, has not considered a referendum to return the county to an elected, rather than appointed county assessor, a spokesman said via email on Monday.

“Assessment necessitates a three-pronged, coordinated approach, between the county executive’s appointed assessor, the county attorney and the Assessment Review Commission,” said Michael Martino, Curran’s spokesman.

“It makes sense the assessor be an appointed member of the administration so we can establish an equitable and defensible tax roll,” the email continued.

Does it?

The appointed assessor system has been tested through the administrations of three county executives, Democrat and Republican.

The idea was that an appointed assessor, beholden to and under the policy direction of the county executive, would make a complex system better.

But it hasn't.

Instead, the number of property tax grievances has skyrocketed.

This year, for the second year in a row, more than half of Nassau’s households are seeking assessment relief — because the property owners believed the system to be unfair.

Meanwhile, the backlog of money owed property owners who successfully grieved their assessments has been growing.

More than a decade ago, the county’s assessment-related obligations and debt were found to be the most significant drain on the county’s budget.

That situation hasn’t gotten much better.

About the only bright spot over the years has been a state control board’s insistence that Nassau begin to pay that debt with operating funds rather than capital borrowing — a method Nassau in the 1990s used to mask the true size of its budget deficit.

Assessment refunds became such an albatross that Edward Mangano, Curran’s Republican predecessor, relied on a settlement program to minimize the county’s financial exposure.

The program worked -- for the county budget, that is.

However, homeowners who did not grieve, or who grieved assessments and did not win, now bear an increasing, unequal and unfair property tax burden.

For the Curran administration, the politics of assessment are getting tricky.

Curran, a Democrat, has twice failed to win approval — first from state lawmakers and then from the control board, the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, to borrow money to pay off a portion of the tax certiorari backlog.

And the administration likely will try once more, with a new plan involving $300 million in borrowing, to make a dent in what Martino said was a minimum of $360 million in backlogged debt.

“Residents are paying years-old cert debt, while the county has to borrow to satisfy new cert judgments,” he said. “It is a cycle that cannot be stopped until the past debt is wiped away ... What the budget gets is a real number that can actually pay current cert debt, not debt from years ago.”

But Curran also is facing criticism for keeping Mangano’s settlement program in place. And for not addressing — although the administration tried and failed to get approval from state lawmakers — inequities that, absent a housing bust, will remain for many residents even after new assessment values are put into place.

Fixing assessment is a full-time concern.

The advantage of an elected assessor is that the responsibility would rest with one office, rather than a department or  an administration.

Administrators are responsible to the county executive.

An elected assessor would be responsible to Nassau voters.