The-Leader_2004-12-23

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69 th Year, No. 51 Free port, N.Y. 11520
The Community Newspaper
Thursday, December 23, 2004
THE JOLLY ONE: Norma Braun and Carol Sparaco welcome an old friend
by Bill and Norma Brauin
Otto's Sea Grill was jammed Saturday evening, December 18, waiting for Santa Claus to appear at Otto's Annual Christmas Party.
Santa did not disappoint the happy crowd, and excellent food and drink, in conjunction with live music for dancing folks of all ages, provided a most enjoy­able prelude to the Holiday Season.
Resolving 50 years of problems
by Laura Schofer and Douglas Finlay
In a far-ranging interview with The Leader's editors at their offices, Nassau County Comptroller Howard Weitzman, provided a sobering yet encouraging glimpse of the sea-change currently underway in the oldest county in America, as it fights its way out from insolvency and works to rebuild a more financially secure future for county res­idents of tomorrow.
"We are the oldest suburb in America and we need to reinvent ourselves," said Mr. Weitzman. "We've been trapped for 50 years."
No topic was out of bounds. From school taxes, to property taxes and the new assessments, to changes within the assess­ment department, to private/public rela­tionships, to plans to reconstruct the Hub and the Coliseum, and to the Nassau University Medical Center, Mr. Weitzman made his case that a new order of doing
business was necessary - if not imminent - to reclaim the status it once enjoyed at the forefront of American development when it built and introduced America to Levittown, the nation's first suburb. ,.. "We'll really be in trouble," said Mr. Weitzman, "if we don't keep our young people and our seniors. We must find new ways to finance services in the county."
Taxes and assessment
Mr. Weitzman stressed that the Nassau County tax is the smallest part of your tax bill. He said that the recent reassessment process "actually helped shift the Nassau County portion of tax burden from the South Shore communi-fies up to the North Shore."
Of course^ that has nothing to do with your school taxes. "That's the largest portion of your tax bill and that has nothing to do with the county," he said. "What people need to remember is that taxes rely on budgets. All reassessment does is tell us how to divide the pie. If
home values go down, assessment goes down." But that doesn't mean your taxes will go down.
"It's about what percentage of the pie you pay. What drives taxes are budgets and here in Nassau County each entity has its own budget-schools, municipalities, water and sewer districts, libraries and parking author­ities. It goes on and on," he said.
The Assessment Department
Discussing the tax assessment depart­ment responsible for assessing all prop­erties within the county, he explained that there was a continuing need to sta­bilize the system but that actions were indeed being taken to make it run more efficiently to save taxpayer dollars.
"There are 40,000 home sales in the county each year," Mr. Weitzman said, "but we don't have to assess them every year like we're doing.'l A court order has required the county to assess the proper­ty values each year for the next six years, but "we want to get away from
these yearly appraisals."
One reason could lie in the percentage of assessments given each, year, and which has seen steady declines each year to its one-quarter percent status as of the latest assessment. Because the percent­age of values can be looked at as a cor­rectional mechanism, as the percentage of assessment goes down, the truer mar­ket value of the property emerges. When appraisals finally end with the court order, market values will be assumed to be correct and appraisals unnecessary. Percentages will have bottomed out and no longer be necessary for correction purposes.
He added that it was expected that griev­ances would be eliminated altogether because as truer market values emerge there would be no recourse to grieve, as assess­ments would reflect market values and not . be set by the assessment department. • In addition, he said the Cole-Layer-Trumble (CLT), the assessment company (continued on page 15)