Equality AND Due Process
We’re expecting a crowd to show up for the upcoming public hearing on the large parcel issue being held by the recently reconstituted Onteora School Board next Thursday, August 10, in the Junior/Senior High School cafeteria. Most of those wishing to be heard will speak about the hurt the tax apportionment equation brought Olive residents when implemented by a previous board two summers ago. A few town officials, most likely from Woodstock, will speak in favor of implementing it again. There will be anger and, in the end, a vote later in August not to implement the legislation for the coming year.
Among all the talk, we’re wondering how people will bring up the Town of Olive’s recent revaluation of its tax rolls, bringing the community to 100 percent, current-as-can-be valuation for the first time in decades. But we suspect that, given the relative quiet with which the impact notices were met and formally grieved last Spring, not a whole lot will be said. Excepting some mention of the expected lawsuits from New York City over the way its own assessments were raised. Or not… lawsuits, until settled, tend to have a hush about them.
Consider Shandaken’s current case brought by 20 residents whose holdings make up a good chunk of the town’s private lands. It was dismissed by the judge hearing it on technical terms. And yet it’s not going away, with those suing having not only started speaking about appeals, but also having filed a Civil Rights lawsuit against their town for bad assessment practices, and started a more formal grievance procedure this past Spring that’s making sure to cross all the Ts an dot all Is this time around.
Many on the town’s side have tried pooh-poohing those suing the town by denigrating their character, calling them, essentially, rich interlopers out to sink a good deal that cut taxes for others via the new assessments’ use as a bargaining tool in a suit the town’s been fighting against New York State for years. But they underestimate the importance of tax complaints in local politics, as well as the validity of complaints that point out problems in methodology, and not just monetary amounts.
The plaintiffs have noted that their battle is about pushing the state’s entire assessment system to acknowledge its need to look not only at values, but at the ways in which those values are arrived at. As such, they are fighting a truly democratic battle, with a small D, that’s all about ensuring fairness and due process – the basic tenets upon which all our American freedoms have been based and won.
People may disagree about the parity of taxes between towns, as happened, and is still happening, around the Large Parcel issue. And they may disagree about the values their properties are given when re-evaluated on a townwide basis, as occurred in Olive this past year, and has happened everywhere else we can think of in this county, apart from Shandaken, in the last few years. But they do not, at heart, disagree about the absolute unfairness the Large Parcel Legislation represented, stripping individuals of any process by which they could contend the massive hikes that occurred to their taxes. Just as no one has ever bitterly complained about the need to reval, or the careful process by which such regulated town-wide reassessments take place.
The situation in Shandaken should not be denigrated, especially by those in power, as some sort of anomaly or affront. Moreover, it should not be called “political,” unless one is willing to look at the requests being made via the lawsuits as being rooted in the most basic of political rights… the same cry for equality and rightness, in the final rounds, as sparked the revolution that created this nation.
Government is a farce if it refuses to consider ALL criticisms of its ability to be fair in a fair manner. More so if those criticisms involve taxation, the bedrock on which government runs.
To imply that a town is using favoritism in the way it taxes its constituents, no matter whether they be full-time or part-time residents, businesses, or state or city agencies that own land among us, is serious. And it implies that something has gone wrong with the assessment procedure.
It’s one thing for a town whose assessments have been redone according to law within the past few years to challenge such complaints. They can do so by pointing to both backable figures and the process by which valuation was arrived at. But it’s another for a town who has not faced its own assessments for over 20 years to then denigrate those questioning its methodology, especially when no revals have been done because people were afraid of what they might find out. And the way the political atmosphere might change.
Today’s assessed valuations should no longer be seen in relation to Carter-era values established when ours was a different world. Our town governments should not hide from the basic democratic process of looking at all its assessments together anymore. Shandaken has to re-evaluate.
Just as Olive did this past year.
See you in Boiceville on Thursday!
Paul Smart