Press Room
You Are Here:
County Association Testifies before the NYS Property Tax Commission
February 12, 2008
Tuesday’s county testimony before the New York State Property Tax Commission focused on three points:
- Cost shifts from the state to county governments have a direct impact on the growing property tax crisis in New York State;
- The need for win-win-win solutions, like the Medicaid Cap that benefited property taxpayers, county governments and the state; and
- Rebates don’t work: or in the words of Governor Spitzer in his State of the State address, a rebate check “doesn’t cure the disease.”
“New York has the highest local taxes in America, and that’s not because every Democrat and every Republican, upstate and downstate, doesn’t care about taxes,” said NYSAC Executive Director Stephen J. Acquario. “It’s because the state has forced expenses down to the local governments.”
"Counties outside New York City collect $4.3 billion in property taxes each year, which represents a fraction (less than 20 percent on average) of the real property tax burden facing New Yorkers. The public tax dollars at the county level are used to pay for programs devised at the State or federal level and delivered locally. “Most of what we do—as high as 80 percent of our spending—is mandated by the state,” Acquario said in his testimony.
To emphasize how cost shifts impact local property taxpayers, the testimony pointed to two aspects of the 2008-09 Executive Budget that would increase costs for counties. The first is a shift of an additional 2 percent of the cost of public assistance to counties and the City of New York, while the State would pay two percent less. “Since the Great Depression, the state and counties have shared equally in the cost of public assistance, 50% state and 50% local share,” according to Acquario. The second proposal is a shift in cost of juvenile detention centers. Effective April 1, 2008, counties will assume 100% of the cost for youth placed by the Family Court in secure and non-secure detention facilities. Both of these shifts demonstrate why New York’s tax burden is the highest in the nation.
The state-county partnership that was established to Cap the local share of Medicaid costs is the win-win-win example in the testimony because it provided immediate relief to county taxpayers, controlled future costs for counties and was a catalyst to facilitate Medicaid reform at the State level.
In terms of the property tax rebates enacted several years ago, they “are barely band aids and have not addressed the root cause of the property tax problem,” said Acquario. Current law requires counties to fund any delinquent real property taxes owed to school districts and make them whole every April 1st—to the tune of $353 million to cover unpaid taxes last year. To make matters worse, the State provided STAR rebates to those people who didn’t pay their tax bills.
“One of the win-win proposals that could come from this group, and I am confident there could be several, is to have the State Tax Department to intercept the STAR rebates from home owners who haven’t paid their property taxes in the first place,” said Acquario. “This would be a step in the direction of reducing the amount that counties have to provide to make school districts whole.”
The New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC), founded in 1925, is a bi-partisan municipal association representing the 62 counties of New York State. NYSAC is the only statewide association representing the interests of nearly 5,000 elected and appointed officials, including county executives, legislators, supervisors, administrators, commissioners and other employees who deliver essential services to the public.
###