County Executive Laura Curran gives the year-in-review at Nassau County Police Headquarters...

County Executive Laura Curran gives the year-in-review at Nassau County Police Headquarters in Mineola on Thursday. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost

Nassau has acknowledged it posted an incorrect assessment roll Wednesday that included 18,400 errors in homeowners’ property tax assessments.

Officials say the errors now have been corrected in the tentative roll, which is the first to include new values for all 424,000 commercial and residential properties from the countywide reassessment authorized by County Executive Laura Curran this year. The new values will first be used in the October 2020 school tax bills.

Disclosure of the mistakes came as the owner of a large tax protest firm held a news conference Thursday morning urging homeowners to grieve their new assessments while Curran, a Democrat, announced late Thursday afternoon that the deadline for filing grievances will be extended from March 1 to April 30.

Sean Acosta, who runs Property Tax Correction Consultants of Jericho, said too many mistakes are being made as the county revalues properties for the first time in eight years. “I’m all for the reassessment,” Acosta said, “It’s how its being rolled out. We want to make sure the [new] market value is the right market value on your home.”

Elinor Haber, 74, who attended the news conference with her husband George, said she has lived in her Jericho home for 44 years but doesn’t know if she can stay because her taxes are going up 60 percent while her income is fixed.

“To the county executive, I have this message,” she said. “We are seniors. We vote. The Democratic Party is supposed to represent us as well . . . I am not a millionaire. I happen to live in a house that appreciated. I don’t necessarily want to move. You’re forcing us to leave our homes.”

The errors in the tentative roll are the latest in a series of missteps in the assessment process, including mistakes in 20,000 disclosure notices, preliminary rather than final numbers posted along with wrong dates in thousands of online tax impact statements and the late mailing of statements to commercial property and condominium owners.

William Biamonte, spokesman for Democratic lawmakers, said, “The assessment department must bring in professional data management assistants forthwith to avoid any further snafus like this. Our residents deserve nothing less than solid, accurate and foolproof information.”

A spokesman for Presiding Officer Richard Nicolello (R-New Hyde Park) said, “The release of the assessment roll with 18,400 mistakes is only the most recent example of the untrustworthiness of this assessment process. This further erodes the confidence of all taxpayers, since no one may rely on the values produced by the assessor.”

Nicolello announced Wednesday that county legislature’s Republican majority had filed a bill to extend the deadline for filing tax grievance from March 1 to April 30. Curran last year had supported an extension.

On Wednesday, Curran announced that the Assessment Review commission, the county agency that handles tax protests, had agreed to the extension. “The goal of my administration is to provide fair and accurate values for all property owners in Nassau County, while preserving the right to grieve,” Curran said in a letter to legislative leaders. “Historically, a grace period has been provided by ARC with bipartisan support, but never legislated.”

Assessor David Moog acknowledged the errors in a statement late Wednesday explaining that the roll posted Wednesday morning and provided to several tax grievance firms mistakenly used information from an older data file that did not include final numbers.

He issued the statement in response to questions from Newsday, which had received a complaint from a homeowner who said his tentative assessment had increased from a Nov. 1 notice from the county disclosing assessment changes.

The county has insisted that there were no assessment increases since Nov. 1, only 85,000 reductions resulting from property owners’ feedback.

Moog said the tentative roll has been reposted with the correct data, which was to be provided to the tax grievance firms Thursday.

“I apologize for the inconvenience this error may have caused and for any confusion to the county’s property owners,” Moog said in the statement. “The notices with correct information will be mailed to all property owners.”

Curran’s predecessor, Edward Mangano, a Republican, froze county tax rolls in 2011 while granting thousands of assessment reductions in a program to reduce tax refund costs. Newsday found that the program, after seven years, had shifted $2.2 billion in taxes onto homeowners who didn’t grieve.

Curran and Nassau Democratic chairman Jay Jacobs have criticized the tax grievance firms for making millions of dollars off the frozen rolls while contributing primarily to Republicans. Curran also received contributions from the firms.

Nassau County's property reassessment process has been marked by stumbles and adjustments.

  • On Dec. 14, the assessor announced that he was adjusting the values on more than 40,000 residential properties after hearing from homeowners about errors in their new property tax assessments.
  • On Dec. 19, county officials acknowledged that a wrong date was included in Nassau’s tax impact statements that had been posted online and mailed to county residents over the past few weeks. The notices said the new values would become final in April 2021. But they will actually become final a year earlier — in April 2020.
  • On Nov. 30, the county said it had corrected 60,000 tax-impact notices posted on the county’s website because the assessor had used preliminary, rather than final, values when estimating reassessments' effects on property tax bills.
  • Earlier in November, the county said it would have to correct 20,000 tax disclosure notices because they included assessments that increased by more than the 6 percent allowed by state law.
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