Nassau County Executive candidate Adam Haber (D-Roslyn) on Thursday charged that the failure of both current County Executive Edward P. Mangagno and former County Executive Tom Suozzi to adequately address the county’s tax assessment system has placed Nassau County on a path followed by a city recently in the news for filing for bankruptcy.
“We live 800 miles from Detroit, give or take, but we are physically closer to where they are fiscally than we are to New York City, the greatest city in the world, which is thriving,” Haber said. “Nothing gets built here, and Nassau County is slowly, slowly disintegrating, and I hope the first step to us getting back on track is fixing this $100 million-a-year hole we have because nobody has the temerity to try and change it.”
At a press conference outside the Nassau County Supreme Court Building in Mineola, Haber said he plans to restore the effectiveness of the assessor’s office by adding 60 employees to oversee the 425,000 taxable properties in Nassau County, which he said would add $3.5 million to the county’s budget and result in $80 million per year in tax refunds.
“It’s great to say we have small government, but if you can’t administer the government, then what’s the point?” Haber said.
Haber said his plan would reassess residential property values every three years to account for market changes and implement a moratorium on tax challenges during the second year of the cycle. The plan would also assess commercial property annually and would require commercial property owners to file an annual income statement so that building owners who lost tenants would have an immediate tax relief.
“The county needs a revenue neutral solution,” Haber said. “That solution doesn’t cost taxpayers any more money and corrects the assessment process where it starts, at the property level.”
The plan would also reduce the assessment cycle from 15 months to 10 months so that only one fiscal period would be represented during an assessment cycle, Haber said.
Haber, who is opposing Suozzi in a September primary, said Nassau’s debt burden has nearly doubled under Mangano and Suozzi, who after being defeated by Mangano for the county executive position in 2009 is running for the Democratic nomination against Haber this year.
Haber also criticized Mangano, who is up for re-election in this year’s race, for “passing tax increases through fee hikes onto Nassau residents and taxed our future with tremendous amounts of unsustainable tax assessment and refunding borrowing.”
Haber, a businessman who serves as a trustee on the Roslyn Board of Education, questioned the county’s recently-announced $41.5 million surplus in its primary operating fund amid $300 million still owed in refunds to property owners.
“Instead of fixing the problem, we’re paying almost usurious rates in county money and taxpayer money to pay back these loans that are still not on the books and unfunded,” Haber said.
Mangano spokesman Brian Nevin said in a statement that Mangano has been working to eliminate more than $1.3 billion in county debt while also “holding the line” on property taxes. He said the county recently approved a plan to repay homeowners of their property tax refunds, which he said was created while Suozzi was in office.
In a statement, Suozzi spokesman Danny Kazin defended the former county executive’s “pay-as-you-go” plan to reduce the backlog of owed tax refunds, which he said decreased by 75 percent under Suozzi and dramatically cut Nassau’s overall debt.
Kazin also said Mangano has worsened the assessment system by cutting staff and not paying bills owed to taxpayers.
“Now debt is the highest in Nassau’s history,” Kazin said.
But Haber said Suozzi, who announced he would run for county executive in February, achieved little in reforming the program in his previous term in office, even with a Democratic majority in the county Legislature.
“Who knows what Suozzi would try and do [if elected]?” Haber said. “He should have used that Democratic majority to pass tax reforms when he had the chance. Again, Tom Suozzi had eight years to fix the tax assessment system and he failed to do that.”
