Nassau County: Property tax assessment results now available online

Nassau County residents now can review tentative assessment values for properties that will be used for the 2020-2021 tax year, the county executive said on Wednesday, meeting a deadline for posting the data online.

The website is mynassauproperty.com. The latest calculations follow a 60-day review, during which homeowners could — and did — protest the preliminary market values.

Critics have identified flaws in the County Executive Laura Curran administration's overhaul of the property tax system, from robocalls to inaccurate data.

Curran, a Democrat, in a statement said this is the first countywide reassessment in almost a decade. Edward Mangano, a Republican, had frozen the tax rolls in 2011, one of the first steps in his plan to update a system that spawned grievances.

Said Curran: “Striving for fairness and accuracy, the Department of Assessment has completed the challenging reassessment process and produced updated market values for every property in Nassau County.” 

The new values first will be used in the October 2020 school tax bills.  Before that, the tentative assessment roll period will end in April 2020, and the county will issue the final roll, Curran said.    

Curran, who had campaigned on a promise to fix property taxes, said her administration succeeded "despite some expected and unexpected challenges and important adjustments."

She stressed the importance of the just-ended 60-day review. "Over the past two months, we listened to all of our property owners’ concerns and appreciated every piece of feedback we received, as it helped our experts generate an accurate assessment roll that we are confident we can defend.” 

Nassau's property tax system, critics said, repeatedly failed property owners as, for example, the impact of people who successfully cut their tax bills by grieving left those who did not seek reductions stuck with higher tax bills.

Generally, homeowners are more likely to see tax increases if they had grieved continuously over the years, driving down their market values, officials say.

The Curran administration's missteps included robocalling 400,000 people instead of 3,500 seniors it meant to contact.

And in mid-December, Nassau County Assessor David Moog said he was adjusting the values on more than 40,000 of the county’s 386,000 residential properties after hearing from thousands of homeowners about errors in their new property tax assessments. 

During the 60-day review, eventually more than 85,000 values for the 2020-2021 tentative assessment roll were lowered from preliminary new market values listed in the assessment disclosure notices that were mailed out starting Nov. 1, Curran said.

About 65,000 of those reductions were due to adjustments made for neighborhood, section, block, topography, inventory, and other "taxpayer inputs," such as brick facades and fireplaces, she said. About 20,000 of those decreases were for vacant land.

Publishing the tentative assessment roll allows property owners to grieve their assessed values. 

In her statement, Curran said she was assuring "the public that they will always have the right to grieve but they should not have to do so to obtain a correct assessment. It’s the Administration’s job to get it right."

The county executive set another deadline: All property owners should receive a Notice of Tentative Assessed Value — which will include directions for challenging the data — in the mail by Jan. 31, she said.

The notices also will include: the property’s full market value, the level of assessment, tentative assessed value and, for classes two and four, their transitional assessed value. Class two is condominiums, cooperative apartments and multiple dwellings. Class four is commercial property.

Asked why the notices did not include prior year assessment data, a Curran spokesman previously said that data was omitted because it might confuse property owners as the county had changed the level of assessment from .25 percent to .10 percent.

Still, critics have said the 2003 countywide reassessment included past and proposed values as well as tax impact even though Nassau also had changed the level of assessment.

On Jan. 7, Curran said, notices will start being mailed, first to class one property owners, the category for residential and residential capped.

Curran said she was encouraging residents with questions to make an appointment at one of the satellite offices which will remain open until Jan. 31. Residents can make their appointments at askthecountyassessor.com.  

About 1,160 property owners have January appointments, and more than 7,000 slots are available, she said.