Website offers tax burden comparisons

Five days before school elections statewide, a conservative policy group unveiled an Internet-based tool for residents to compare total school district, municipal and county tax burdens across the state.

"There are literally thousands of different combinations of taxing jurisdictions to compare," said Tim Hoefer, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy. "Our web tool makes it possible for users to drill down to a specific school district in a particular town, and to easily compare multiple jurisdictions."

The center also released a report finding Long Island has the lowest property tax rate burden compared with home values of any state region, based on state comptroller data. The center excluded New York City and Nassau County from more detailed rankings of individual municipalities, the center said, because of complex property classification systems in the city and Nassau.

The rankings -- available at seethroughny.net/BenchmarkingNY/tabid/98/Default.aspx#/ -- showed New York's highest effective property tax rates are in cities and rural areas with low property values, while the lowest rates are in resort communities and areas with high property values.

But using home values to compare tax rates does not accurately reflect the Island's property tax burden, observers said.

"Long Islanders may have a relatively lower effective tax rate because they have relatively higher property values and incomes. But it's still a big burden -- more than 8 percent of income, measured another way -- that more and more people find unbearable," said Lawrence C. Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University's National Center for Suburban Studies.

According to the Empire Center, the highest effective tax rate in Suffolk was for Babylon Town residents in the Babylon school district -- $26.35 per $1,000 of property value, compared with a county median of $18.60 and a state median of $27.43.

Babylon school officials called the findings flawed and said the Empire Center is "trying to incite anger with bogus, deceitful information days before the school budget vote."

"In their own words, they admit their calculations are 'approximations,' " superintendent Ellen Best-Laimit said in a statement, adding that tax rate rankings are meaningless. "We all know that a low tax rate doesn't necessarily mean a low tax bill."

Babylon town officials said in a statement that town taxes are "are among the lowest on Long Island."