What Suffolk supers vs. the tax cap shows

This month Suffolk County town supervisors fired the opening salvo in what threatens to be a serious effort to pierce holes in New York's property tax cap. Taxpayers should take notice.

In a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers, the 10 supervisors urged Albany officials to change the tax-cap formula, citing "the growing financial pressures facing local governments."

They claimed, bogusly, that the cap will only allow them to increase how much property tax they collect this coming year by 2%, below the 3.1% inflation observed over the relevant 12-month period ending in June.

Local tax caps are rarely exactly 2%. The cap is a multipart formula that varies for each town, city, county, village and school district each year. It factors in things like how much the tax base has grown in the last year — and all 10 towns' tax bases are growing. There are other exceptions, like allowing towns to raise taxes extra to cover their ballooning police pension costs, which have surged to record highs.

Even if the cap were a hard 2% limit, it takes just as many votes — three — for most town boards to override it as does for them to pass their budget. The seven-member Brookhaven board is one of a handful in the state that must muster a fifth vote, and it had no problem overriding the cap for 2025, voting unanimously, Newsday's news division reported.

So why are supervisors bellyaching? It's because they don't like the optics of taking an extra step to hike property taxes.

But that was the point of the cap: It changed tax increases from being almost-guaranteed annual events into something for which local officials must make a public case.

The tax cap more than anything is an affordability measure. It helps people stay in their homes by controlling how much property tax they pay, either as homeowners or indirectly through their rents. No law enacted by Albany in the past quarter-century has done more to improve affordability than the 2011 property tax-cap law and the billions it's saving New Yorkers annually.

The only reason to weaken the tax cap would be to make property taxes rise faster. Is that what supervisors want?

They're wrong to fault the tax cap, but have a point about how Albany has dumped new or bigger costs on local governments, and that's where supervisors should be targeting their advocacy. This year Hochul and state lawmakers (in both parties) retroactively hiked pension benefits for public employees, which is pushing up local taxes and making it tougher for supervisors to stay under the cap.

Public employee unions, chiefly the teachers unions, have been scheming for more than a decade to weaken the cap because it limits the size of the raises they can demand from taxpayers. The Suffolk supervisors are playing into this.

The tax cap was supposed to be paired with an overhaul of the unfunded mandates state government puts on Long Island along with the rest of the state, but Albany didn't finish the job. There are plenty of opportunities that could ease local costs. For one, the state could stop forcing local governments and schools to keep giving automatic pay raises even after union contracts expire.

Generations of choices by Albany made local government more expensive than it should be. The Suffolk supervisors should stop maligning the property tax cap and start demanding the overdue reforms that will make it easier for them to live with it.

This guest essay reflects the views of Ken Girardin, a fellow at Manhattan Institute.