Cuomo Proposes Property Tax Cuts in Budget Address

  |  January 22, 2014
AP Photo

AP Photo

Did anyone happen to catch Governor Cuomo’s budget address yesterday? We didn’t, but we did read the transcript, which you can also read, if you’re dying to, here (be prepared for an onslaught of grammatical and spelling errors). Even though we knew it was coming, we were interested to hear the Governor’s plan for cutting property taxes. Before explaining his plan, he offered his explanation for why taxes are so high in New York: Too much local government. “Figure this out, when you have as many levels of local government as we have and you are supporting that many subdivisions the cost is going to be high,” Cuomo explained. “So we want to freeze the property tax number one to provide relief to struggling homeowners, but number two to incentivize consolidation and shared services.”

And the plan? Freeze property taxes IF the local government can stay within a 2% cap on budget increases from year to year. We’ll let the Governor himself explain:

“Homeowners will be eligible for the property tax freeze if one, the local government stays within the 2% cap, so it is an incentive for the locality to stay within the cap. But number two, the local government implements an approved plan to save at least 1% a year for three years and a total of 3% reduction in cost. So what this really then lays out is a five year plan. Year one, there will be a freeze if the local government lives within the cap. Year two, the state will credit to a freeze if the local government puts in a plan to save 1% per year for three years. And then year three they would save 1%, year four 2%, year five 3%. These would be county wide shared services for consolidation plans which would save in the aggregate 1% per year of the total tax levy, not the operating budget, the total tax levy for three years.”

 

Did you get all that? Long story short, Cuomo believes that local governments can decrease spending by sharing services. And if they can, everybody gets to keep just a little bit more money every year. Thoughts?

 

 

About Kandy Harris

Kandy is a writer and musician/music teacher living in Saugerties, NY.

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