Troubled Nassau assessment defies easy explanation

A Newsday reporter asked a simple question during Monday's news conference on the embarrassing, maddening issues with Nassau County's assessment system:

Can't mistakes on an assessment be corrected at any time?

We'll get to the answer in a second because the most illuminating part of the exchange came in crisp, clear body language.

Former Smithtown assessor Gregory Hild - New York State's 2010 Assessor of the Year, who was appointed to head a (yet another) committee that will delve into the headache of Nassau's assessment - began to nod yes.

A few feet away, County Executive Edward Mangano, who was standing at a lectern, began to shake his head no.

What's going on?

It's simple. Politics, now more than ever, is driving an essential public function.

That could be good.

Because Mangano (yet again) is gambling his political future on a fix - and related structural changes that he hopes will prop up his proposed 2010 Swiss cheese budget and four-year plan.

More politics also could be bad, however. Take Monday's disconnect between Hild and Mangano, for example.

Hild's head-nod was correct.

Errors on assessment rolls can be corrected with a few strokes of a county computer keyboard anytime.

That's usually all it takes to change whether a property is a business or a residence; or whether a Levittown cape has a couple of bathrooms rather than 70.

But there is a big difference between correcting a mistake and changing a property's assessed value. Appealing an assessment takes time. But in Nassau, the rate of successful appeals is so high that the county is skating toward insolvency (again) in part because it has to bond out millions of dollars to refund overpaid taxes, plus interest, to so many property owners.

Mangano is trying to change that by shifting the burden of those costs from the county to school districts and other taxing entities. It's part of a series of reforms aimed at getting costs (at least the county's) under control.

But Monday, Mangano got bogged down in minutiae while trying to pitch "reform." Instead of answering a question about "errors," he stayed on message about the high cost of "appeals."

The problem is that Nassau's property owners are weary of messages. And it's hard to get nonexperts to care about the nuances of a system that defies easy explanation.

Two years ago, Nassau voters approved a referendum to abolish altogether the elected post of assessor and replace it with an appointed official.

The pitch, at the time, was that an appointed assessor would be spared the pressure (gallows, firing squad) of public anger and be free to do the job of (finally) getting assessment right.

But the embarrassments continued. And there are likely more to come - which will make it even harder for Mangano to shift costs back to schools and other taxing entities:

According to internal e-mails, the county's first appointed (and fired) assessor Ted Jankowski was warned in August that the school district assessment rolls would be wrong unless errors - um, yes, that would be easily fixable errors - were corrected.

They weren't.

And the rest of the still-unfolding mess, unfortunately, has yet to be history.