Mineola NY - Nassau County Executive Laura Curran is proud to announce that, after eight years, the frozen assessment roll of the Mangano Administration has officially come to an end, as Curran continues to fulfill the promise of fixing the broken and unfair assessment system. The Nassau County Assessment Review Commission (ARC) has sent final determination letters to residents and business owners who filed grievances on the County’s 2019-2020 tentative assessment roll.
This also concludes the last year for ARC’s mass settlement program, which was an unfortunate by-product of the Mangano frozen roll. To date, for the 2019-2020 tentative roll, ARC has made 203,732 residential settlement offers, of which 174,281 have been accepted and 20,437 have been rejected. Of these offers, 127,459 were part of the mass settlement program.
The county settled a total of 1,003,434 residential cases after assessment rolls were frozen beginning with the 2012-13 tax year.
During the frozen roll, the County lost over one-third of its assessed value – in a rising market - as property owners kept grieving. DOA estimates that the total shift of tax burden resulting from the mass settlement program for the 2019-2020 roll onto property owners who did not grieve this year is approximately $128 million. This broken system and significant loss of assessed value countywide was also driving up school tax rates.
“This marks an end to an era of an inherently unfair system which gave grievers a more favorable ratio and almost guaranteed a reduction. No longer will there be two different levels of assessment at ARC and DOA, and no longer will one half of property owners be subsidizing the other half,” said County Executive Curran. “I want to assure residents that you will always have the right to grieve, but you shouldn’t have to do so to obtain a fair assessment of your home. We took on the challenge of the reassessment and, with the help of two outside local vendors, we produced updated fair market values for property in Nassau County for the first time in nearly a decade.”
“Beginning with the new 2020-2021 tentative roll, ARC is reaffirming its goal and its duty to conduct meaningful review of individual properties on their own merits rather than settle en masse. This welcome change is being made possible by the accuracy of updated values and the restoration of staffing levels needed to address the volume of filings,” said ARC Chairwoman Robin Laveman.
This 2019-2020 tentative assessment roll, published on January 2, 2018, is the last Mangano frozen roll. Residents and other property owners will receive bills based on this roll in October 2019 for school district taxes and January 2020 for County, town and special district taxes.
Due to the Mangano administration’s frozen roll, ARC had little choice but to use class ratios substantially different than the levels of assessment set by the Department of Assessment, resulting in Mangano’s policy of mass settlements. This too ends with the final Mangano roll of 2019-2020.