Nassau County on the right path for reassessment

Glimmering faintly in the distance, the vision of a fiscally functional Nassau County can be glimpsed for the first time in a very long time. But it’s going to take competence, discipline, cooperation from county officials and a change of habits from property owners to reach it.

In an ordinary county, the property-tax roll is reasonably accurate, legally defensible and generally trusted. In an ordinary county, the property-tax assessment system is an ignored bureaucratic function, not a hot-button issue. In an ordinary county, appealing property taxes is a rare step taken to correct occasional errors, not an annual rite for the majority. In an ordinary county, tax grievance firms are a cottage industry, not a huge business that gives millions of dollars in political donations and makes more than $500 million in eight years. In an ordinary county, refunds on overtaxed properties are a minor expense, not a primary driver of a $3.5 billion debt burden.

County Executive Laura Curran, a Democrat elected in 2017, committed herself to fixing the Nassau assessment system. Her process has not been perfect, but it has moved the system in the right direction in fairly short order even though the challenges she faced were massive and entrenched.

When a court-ordered property-tax revaluation was completed in 2002 under then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat, to address a system that had become broadly biased against lower-income property owners and minority residents, it was the first reassessment since 1938. The change brought a storm of appeals when many residents saw huge increases in their assessed values and bills. It also required huge payouts by Nassau because state law says the county must refund 100 percent of the overpayments of owners who win tax challenges after the final tax rolls are set in April, even though the county gets only about 16 percent of the money paid in. The school districts and villages keep what they are overpaid.

Under Suozzi, the county fought to keep the roll accurate, largely succeeding, and to reduce the $100 million-plus in annual refunds, largely failing.

Then Suozzi’s successor, Republican Edward Mangano, turned back: In 2011, he froze the values and started granting most residential assessment reductions sought, which was done so quickly that the values could be lowered before the taxes in school districts and other entities were set. That mostly eliminated overpayments, which slashed residential refunds. Mangano’s plan did save about $25 million a year, but threw the property values and taxes out of whack. The result was a $2.7 billion shift of the tax burden over eight years from those who protested assessments to those who did not.

The challenge Curran and her administration faced was reassessing county properties to create an accurate roll — and finding a way to implement it that corrects the inequities created under Mangano and avoids tax hikes so large and fast that they capsize the real estate market and the finances of residents. According to a recent Newsday investigation that analyzed the new assessment system, the county has done it.

The old system overassessed those who had not grieved by 29 percent, an inequity the new roll has corrected. And the Newsday analysis found an error rate of 8.8 percent, well within industry norms and right in line with the 7.8 percent inaccuracy rate found by state officials and the 8.5 percent rate found by a county consultant.

This competent roll of 426,000 properties still will include tens of thousands of somewhat inaccurate assessments and as much as 5 percent of properties, or 16,000 of them, overassessed by 20 percent or more. There’s no avoiding a certain level of inaccuracy in assessment.

So how does Nassau get to assessment-system normality? First, the county must approve the five-year phase-in of the new values, a necessary evil that slows down the return to fair values for the overtaxed to soften a tax-hike shock to those underpaying. Although Republicans in the county legislature have fought many aspects of the reassessment, they are generally ready to support this move.

Then Nassau must process 250,000 assessment challenges before the tax roll becomes permanent in April 2020. After that, any reductions granted will generate those big refunds. And the county must steer the process year after year, keep an accurate roll, process appeals quickly and persuade taxpayers to challenge only when assessments are truly too high.

If the county can manage that, the assessment-appeal industry and the attention residents devote to assessments in Nassau could shrink to an ordinary size. To get to that place glimmering in the distance, so the county can move on to confront other challenges, every political constituency needs to grab an oar and row toward that goal.

If not, the unaffordable refunds will again pile up, the assessment system will again devolve into chaos, and Nassau County will continue to be one of the richest counties in the United States served by one of the brokest county governments.