Viewpoint

Building Better Legislators

Five state legislators do the perp walk on criminal charges in five weeks, with maybe more on the way.

I always try to look at the bright side. One of these legislators wore a wire for three years and there haven’t been nearly as many arrests or indictments as some might have figured. Another silver lining is that a bunch of the charges really aren’t about corrupting government functions, but about political greed and personal sleaze. So we’ve got all of that going for us. Call me Mr. Sunshine.

Health Insurance Crisis Still Here

If you are in the market for health insurance coverage in Nassau County and are merely an individual, not part of a business or organization that helps pay for your policy, you don’t have a lot of attractive options. The largest health insurance company in this state, covering more than 5.5 million New Yorkers, offers two comprehensive insurance options. They will cost, depending on how much choice you want in what care providers you see, between $1,533.76 and $1,916.32 per month.

We haven’t added in your spouse or your kids, dental or vision, or the many copayments. You will have to wait nine to 11 months to be covered for pre-existing conditions, so if you have a chronic illness and some prescriptions, you may well have to pay tens of thousands of dollars before your insurance policy kicks in.

Go Down Fighting

Ithaca, a little city in Upstate New York, has done it. Seattle and San Francisco have done it. I hope that more of our local governments will be doing it, because when I started writing about potential catastrophic climate change some 13 years ago, I never thought that we’d go down with barely a fight. Most of us are going to want a record, some proof, that there were indeed lines drawn.

What these municipal governments have done is to adopt policies in support of public divestment in fossil fuels. Ithaca says it will not hold financial investments in the fossil fuels industry and urges New York’s massive pension funds to also divest and redirect our monies into financially safer, biochemically cleaner, socially responsible investments.

What Is A False Flag?

Most of the readers who saw it were likely confused. At 9 p.m. on the night of the Patriots’ Day detonations in Boston, Governor Deval Patrick and key law enforcement officials held a widely broadcast media conference. After running through what was going to happen next for the people of Boston, the governor began to take questions from reporters. The first person he called on asked this:

“Is this another false-flag staged attack to take our civil liberties and promote homeland security while sticking their hands down our pants on the streets?”

Imperative To Act On Taxes

U.S. Rep. Colfax saw the problems

in our tax system 150 years ago

The first English to plant themselves on Western Long Island brought property taxes with them. The Dutch didn’t leave us much in the way of culture or government, except for some words (cookie!). Medieval English tax systems, they stuck. A little later in the 17th century, colonial New York’s earliest property tax assessment laws actually borrowed language from England’s “Saladin Tythe” of 1188, used to pay for one of the crusades. Some of these concepts survive intact in our property tax system to this day.

Yes, the land taxes that we pay to fund our schools and local governments are pretty much the same taxes that so annoyed Robin Hood and his gang.

Zombies In The Revenue Stream

There are zombies here. Check your property tax bill. Some of those taxing units are dead districts walking. We can get in front of it and manage it, or sit back and eventually watch bankers and brokers and corporations tear at the carcasses. 

 

In 2011, the last year with finalized figures, government units within Nassau County government units collected $5.85 billion in real property taxes. The biggest chunk of this went to school districts ($4.16 billion), followed by the county ($985 million) and the towns, villages and cities ($702 million). Almost uniquely among New York districts and municipalities, most of the overall revenue stream to the state’s public school system is made up of local property taxes (the county, for example, expects to get only 29 percent of its revenues from property taxes in 2013).

 

Tax Breakdown

It was 75 years ago this week, on March 25th, 1938, that the first Nassau County real property assessment men started fanning out to record and evaluate every parcel of land and more than 100,000 buildings then standing. The new 1938 county charter eliminated the five town and city assessment systems and replaced them with one county board, with an elected chairman. The first office, located about 300 feet from the front office of these newspapers on Second Street in Mineola, had gone operational only on March 7th, and 55 men hit the streets less than three weeks later.

Assessments were seriously out of whack between and within the towns and cities. For years, local assessors had avoided expensive tax lawsuits and played politics by lowering assessments too much on thousands of properties. This made it more expensive to sell county, town and district bonds. It was important to the new county government’s credit that it be able to present an accurate picture of its considerable taxable assets. Though total reassessment was wildly unpopular at first, it was sold to the public by elected officials as a scientific reform that would restore fairness to a system imploding under the strain of a rapidly changing real estate market.

The Politics of Parking

Five years ago, Chicago parking meters cost 25 cents an hour. The city, desperate for cash, created a “public-private partnership” with Chicago Parking Meters, LLC, a company backed by Morgan Stanley. In exchange for an up-front lump sum of $1.15 billion, Chicago Parking Meters leased 36,000 parking meters for 75 years. Within a year, parking meter rates quadrupled. For 2013, meters cost between $2 an hour and $6.50 an hour, depending on the neighborhood’s proximity to the downtown “Loop” area. The city receives none of those revenues, and it even has to pay the company if a meter is out of service. The $1.2 billion is all gone.

The Chicago deal caused some municipalities to back away from plans to privatize parking, including Los Angeles, Pittsburgh and, in late January, New York City. But other municipalities moved ahead anyway, insisting that their deals would not be another Chicago. So far, it’s a mixed bag. Indianapolis took less money up front and gets a piece of the revenues every year, but the city is still locked into the contract for 50 years, is still liable for broken meters and revenue in the first two years hasn’t met projections. In early March, Cincinnati voted to privatize its meters, claiming the deal would not be another Chicago or Indianapolis. Cincy is locked in for only 30 years. The administration said that if the council didn’t approve the deal, it would lay off 300 police officers and firefighters, and close community centers. These are the kinds of choices with which Americans are left.

Valuations Made Of Magic

To finalize Nassau County’s 2013 real property tax roll, assessment grievances were filed by owners of 30.1 percent of the county’s 369,827 residential properties, more than triple what used to be the typical grievance rate not many years ago. In some neighborhoods, significantly more than half of property owners have been filing grievances in the last few years, many urged on by elected officials and aggressive consulting firms. So that successful grievances don’t add to the county’s crippling refund backlog, last year county officials settled more than three-quarters of all grievances. This unprecedented tax roll churn isn’t a good thing. It speeds the decoupling of values assessed on a property and the actual tax bill.  

County Executive Ed Mangano, unable to contain himself, ordered a freeze in assessment raises. I guess that’s supposed to show that he hates tax increases, or something. Unfortunately, there are currently three distinct real estate markets in Nassau County (holding up, not holding up and disaster aftermath) and property values are not moving at the same rates. Gimmicks make imbalances worse and lower the accountability that’s crucial to public confidence in the tax system. We may as well set assessments by lottery or by spinning a wheel, because we’re dropping all pretense that the property tax rolls reflect objective reality, and not merely the act of filing paperwork.

Patently Outgunned

America’s intellectual and scientific vitality is being stifled, and billions of dollars a year sucked from unwary consumers, by something that can be fixed or improved by Congress. America’s copyright and patent laws were designed for a horse-and-buggy world. Parts of the system are out of control and we’re all paying for it more and more.

Copyrights and patents are authorized in the U.S. Constitution to encourage creation and invention by ensuring a reasonable period to make a profit. They were not intended to grant a perpetual monopoly on good ideas, whether it’s an important pharmaceutical or software or a better mousetrap.