B.A.R. Brawl

Monthly town board meetings in Richmondville are increasingly becoming like bar-room brawls, with bitter and angry residents confused and throwing punches at anyone dumb enough to stand in the way. The public’s animosity over the ongoing tax assessment controversy in Richmondville has recently seemed to shift from the largely absentee assessor Matt Richardson to the members of the Board of Assessment Review who, critics allege, grossly overstepped their boundaries by improperly lowering the property assessments of a select few. But exactly who is really responsible and what are they responsible for?

Part of the reason for the confusion is New York State’s system of local government. In New York there are numerous tax-levying entities (i.e. school districts, counties, etc.), many of which encompass multiple tax-assessing jurisdictions (i.e. towns, villages and cities). Since all of these tax-assessing entities assess their own property, pretty much all of these communities assess at a different level of market value, creating what appear to be vast discrepancies in assessed value throughout the state. Now, if taxes were levied only in the same community in which they were assessed, the assessment level would matter very little, as in the end the tax rate would be based on the level of services demanded and the budget adopted by the community’s elected officials. Higher assessments would mean a lower tax rate and lower assessments would translate into a higher tax levy.

Unfortunately, towns like Richmondville are not only taxed by the town government. Richmondville is also subject to Schoharie County and Cobleskill-Richmondville School District tax levies. Here’s where the situation gets a bit more complicated, and actually quite understandably provocative for Richmondville taxpayers. In fact, this is why there is so much confusion as to who is paying what.

Over the past several years, the town of Richmondville has seen assessed property values rise, in some cases slowly, in other cases, quite rapidly. Within the town this may have resulted in an uneven distribution of the tax burden with some residents being forced to pay what is obviously more than their fair share, and others less. However, others fear that the assessment problem has also resulted in a much larger shifting of the tax burden onto the town of Richmondville at the county and school district levels.

Critics claim that these rises in assessed value have translated into a significant increase in the percentage of the county budget and the CRCS school district that Richmondville is paying into. This increase could be as much as $500,000 a year coming from Richmondville taxpayers!
Now, if school boards and county governments applied their tax levies evenly across the board, this would result in a substantially unfair and uneven distribution of the tax burden. However, this is not the case. School boards and county governments use the ORPS-determined equalization rate to apportion property tax levies across the multiple assessing jurisdictions within their own boundaries. The purpose of this is to prevent unfairness between different jurisdictions that have different levels of assessment.

All things being unequal

The equalization rate is the ratio of total assessed value to total market value in a given municipality. Currently, Richmondville’s equalization rate according to ORPS is 100%. Meanwhile, the Town of Cobleskill, has an equalization rate of 73 percent. Summit’s equalization rate is only 53%! At this point no other town in Schoharie County comes close to having a 100% equalization rate. But pointing to a higher equalization rate than neighboring municipalities can be misleading.

Imagine both Summit and Richmondville (both part of the CRCS school district) were paying the same school tax rate. That would mean Richmondville was paying twice as much as their neighbors in Summit! This would be truly outrageous. However, the equalization rate is used to prevent just that scenario. The equalization rate is used by school districts and county governments to apportion property taxes across various municipal jurisdictions according to their respective level of assessment. This is supposed to prevent one town or village from carrying an excessive tax burden. Now if this isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, the appropriate parties to be held accountable would be your school board and county government. There’s probably very little your assessor or B.A.R. can do.

Abuse of power?

In an entirely different assessment controversy, one more particular to Richmondville itself, critics also contend that the Board of Assessment Review overstepped its bounds by drastically lowering the assessments of some of the town’s highest assessed properties. According to critics, the B.A.R. has acted in ways that go well beyond its authority and that have actually unfairly lowered some people’s assessments. Critics like John Primeau allege that the B.A.R. in many cases simply rolled assessments back to 2007 and applied a smaller 2% increase. He also claims that some of the highest assessed properties were lowered dramatically, thus shifting the tax burden within the town itself.

The question here is whether the Board of Assessment Review, which is supposed to apply strict and consistent standards for reviewing and potentially altering property tax assessments, has simply applied a general formula as the basis for making changes to assessments. If so, the B.A.R. would have grossly and illegally exceeded its authority. It is an administrative body, which in theory means it is only applying the law, in this case, the property assessments. If there has been an error and the property owner can prove an excessive or unequal assessment, the board can lower that person’s assessment accordingly. Generally applied increases or decreases are legislative actions and therefore completely inappropriate, if in fact that’s what was done.

Primeau also alleges that the B.A.R. dramatically lowered assessments on a handful of highly-assessed properties. He references several cases in which assessed values were decreased anywhere from $75,000 to over $100,000. Richmondville taxpayers have a right to know and a duty to find out what standards were used to decrease these assessments by such amounts. There is also the possibility of conflicts of interest, as Horst Fierek’s property (Fierek is a member of the B.A.R.) received one of the largest decreases in assessed value. Certainly I’m not accusing anyone of improper actions, but the potential for conflict is strong enough to justify an in-depth look, possibly a state audit, at who is receiving lowered assessments and on what basis.

Others allege that the B.A.R. lowered the assessment of Richmondville Power and Light, Richmondville’s municipally-owned power company, by nearly a million dollars over the past several years. John Primeau claims that a B.A.R. member, when questioned about the RPL decrease, told him it was done to keep their rates low. Aside from the fact that RPL does not serve each taxpayer in the town of Richmondville, each of whom would be forced to shoulder the extra tax burden, this is obviously not what the B.A.R. is supposed to do.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to these problems. If indeed, Richmondville has a runaway B.A.R. that is not following the rules for altering assessments, I believe it falls to the state to audit the B.A.R.’s actions. Over the long term, it may be in the town’s interest to switch to a county-based property assessment system. But on that issue I would advise caution (see next post) and recommend county-based assessment only as a last resort.

Additionally, the air needs to be cleared as to Richmondville’s equalization rate compared to other towns. Aligning Richmondville’s equalization rate with that of Cobleskill or any other town in the county, would not have any real effect on the apportionment of school or county taxes or Richmondville’s tax burden. But if you feel Richmondville is being unfairly stuck with a higher percentage of the school or county property tax, feel free to take it up with the school board or the county.

The appropriate way to address any alleged malfeasance is to call for more oversight and an engaged (and informed) citizenry demanding rational explanations for the activities of B.A.R. members.

However, let’s not forget the bottom line. School and county taxes are going up due to rising fuel costs, salary increases and rising insurance costs. Local property assessments have little to do with this. However, when people see that their tax bills are rising in concert with their property assessments, it’s natural to want to point the finger of blame toward the assessor. Combine this with a tax assessor who has seemingly been beyond reach, and you begin to see why people want to blame everything on the assessments.

This doesn’t mean that the Richmondville Board of Assessment Review is beyond criticism. If RPL and other highly-assessed properties received undue or improper decreases in their assessments, it transfers the burden not just onto other Richmondville taxpayers but taxpayers throughout the county and the Cobleskill-Richmondville School District as well. If there is a remedy here, it is to be found through either New York State audits of local assessments and assessment reviews or closer supervision over the activities of B.A.R. members by the Town Board or state auditors.

Schoharie County Board of Supervisors pushing expensive consolidation scheme

With everybody’s favorite new buzzwords being “consolidation” and “sharing services”, it seems like all the politicians want in on the game, apparently regardless of whether the consolidation of the services in question actually results in greater efficiency and thus less cost to the taxpayers. After all, if you consolidate services only to end up performing the same level of service for the same cost or a higher cost to taxpayers, that would just be...dumb, right?

For some inexplicable reason Schoharie County supervisors are considering switching to a county-wide property assessment system, which would relieve towns of the responsibility. The county Board of Supervisors just recently received a consultant’s report on consolidating property tax assessments. Despite the fact that the report’s three alternatives to the current town-based system would be more expensive, county supervisors seem largely in favor of centralizing the property tax assessment system.

The current system costs county taxpayers around $820,000 a year. Meanwhile, switching to any of the three proposed variations of the centralized assessment system would cost more than a million dollars. Now, if we’re going to switch to a more expensive system, there has to be some compelling reason. Like say, if having the county do assessments, we might actually save money in the long run by having more equitable assessments.

However, what reason is their for believing that a group of assessors at the county level is going to somehow better assess properties than the current town assessors? Could this be wishful thinking? In fact, switching to a county-wide assessment system could increase inequity. Larger towns who pay more taxes would end up subsidizing the smaller towns that pay less taxes. It would be a boon to smaller towns who would be relieved of a large expense, and a drag on larger towns who are carrying more of the county’s tax burden on account of their larger population.

I’m far from an expert on consolidating services, but I am pretty sure that the objective is to increase efficiency and save money. This proposal to consolidate property assessment at the county level would do just the opposite; it would drive up the cost of assessing property in Schoharie County.

It’s funny, because it’s not assessments that cause taxes to rise. In fact, it is just this kind of ineptitude and poor judgment that results in wasteful spending and unnecessary bureaucracy that actually results in higher taxes. For the board of supervisors, the additional costs would be a small price to pay for getting rid of the headache that property assessments have caused in certain towns. Pawning the whole assessment mess off on the county is probably the best hope people like John Barlow have of resolving the recurrent controversy.

However, in the end, obsessing over either property assessments or consolidating services is a distraction. If you want to increase efficiency and lower taxes (or free up money to be spent on more important things) get involved with your local school, town and county budgeting processes and fight the wasteful spending that is going on. Or, better yet, encourage responsible growth that builds the tax base but protects the quality of life.

McMansion Owners Complain About Taxes

As Schoharie County slowly morphs from a rural county to a distant exurb of the Capital Region, economic, political and social changes promise to divide the community in many ways. The ongoing property tax debacle in the Town of Richmondville is an example. While the Town certainly has its share of legitimate grievances when it comes to assessments (most Towns do), it is a small minority of McMansion owners who seem to be making most of the noise.

The majority of Richmondville’s residents live in small site-built or manufactured housing along the Route 7 corridor or clustered in the hollows of the surrounding hills. However, where there are good views to be had, we’ve begun to see an influx of large expensive houses popping up.

Two extremely vociferous critics of Richmondville’s assessments are Horst Fierek and Robert Peck. I’m not going to publish any specific information about them personally, although I invite readers to look for themselves on Schoharie County’s website. These individuals’ properties are each assessed at around half a million dollars. Sure, that seems like a lot, until one looks at the homes these people live in: they’re monster houses! In fact, most of these high-assessment properties consist of extravagantly large homes on large parcels with sweeping hillside vistas.

So what do these people expect? Not only do properties with good views fetch higher market prices, but they usually require greater levels of road maintenance by the Town being that they’re built all the way up on top of a mountain. More road means more materials, more fuel for municipal vehicles, more culvert pipes, more repairs after Spring floods, and of course more road to plow during the winter. This way, the homeowners’ benefits of building a home with a good view are balanced out to account for the local government’s added costs of providing services to that property.

Also consider the fact that increased development on hillsides poses significant public safety dangers to residents; just look at the hillside collapsing underneath Horst Fierek’s sprawling mansion off Route 10. Obviously, I’m not saying there’s a one-to-one connection in the case of Route 10 but development obviously puts pressure on the land: streams get diverted, large amounts of soil and clay are displaced, and private water and sewer facilities take their toll as well.

Meanwhile, rural towns often lack the resources to keep up with the services required by increased growth. In few places is this more true than in Richmondville. Here’s a Town with a municipal garage that’s literally falling into a ravine, being held up with chains! The Town office is a shack! Meanwhile, exurban homeowners don’t understand why they’re being forced to bear the brunt of costs for increased services, which their presence creates the need for in the first place!

Personally, I have no sympathy for people who build giant McMansions and then have to pay high taxes. Why should people who live within their means by not building large garish houses have to subsidize a handful of snobs looking down their noses on the rest of us?

If the Horst Fierek’s and Robert Peck’s of Richmondville get their way and thus shift the costs of their services to the already strapped poor of the Town, it would be nothing short of a travesty. There’s more of us than there are of them. While I would like to see Richmondville’s assessment problems evened out, I certainly don’t want to let a few snobs use the issue to weasel out of paying their fair share of taxes.