State senators tackle tax cap impact

Witnesses and state senators wrestled at a public hearing in Mineola Thursday with how to implement a property tax cap without crippling local schools and governments.

A common theme was the need for the state to reduce costly mandates it imposes on local governments so that localities are not hit with a double whammy of constricted property taxes and expanding costs.

"They have to go hand in hand," Sen. John Flanagan (R-Northport) said at the beginning of the joint hearing by the Senate's Committee on Education, which he chairs, and the Committee on Local Government, chaired by Sen. Jack Martins, a Republican who is the former mayor of Mineola.

Martins said mandate relief was "the only way to realistically achieve a long-term, meaningful reduction of this oppressive real property tax burden."

The local hearing came only a day after the tax cap bill, passed by the Senate, was reported stalled in the Assembly, where Democrats said they might not agree with the Senate version. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's proposal would cap property tax increases at 2 percent or the rate of inflation - now about 1.5 percent - whichever is less.

E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, urged the senators to resist any compromise with the Assembly on the bill. "I would urge you very strongly not to negotiate away the strengths of the bill," McMahon said, citing pressure to exempt the cost of teachers' pensions from the cap.

Representatives from the New York Conference of Mayors and the New York State Association of Towns spoke in favor of state actions to curb local costs for pensions and health care for their employees, and relief from the local Medicaid burden.

G. Jeffrey Haber, executive director of the towns group, said the state Taylor Law should be changed to remove or limit the rights of workers to go to binding arbitration. If they go to binding arbitration, he suggested, they should be barred from doing so for the next two bargaining cycles.