Forty- three municipal governments exceeded the newly enacted 2 percent cap on local property tax levy increases, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office said today.
DiNapoli, whose office is charged with ensuring local governments comply with the measure’s requirements, said his auditors are available to help the municipalities follow the new law.
“My auditors will be visiting the municipalities that exceeded their tax cap improperly to make sure they have taken corrective action and educed their tax bills or put any excess property tax revenue into a reserve as required by the law,” DiNapoli said. “Our review assisted local governments by providing insight into common issues and errors calculating the new tax cap, and I have directed my staff to develop additional training and expand our outreach to eliminate these errors.”
An override of the cap, passed in June, requires 60 percent of a local elected board to bypass the limit. Of the governments that overrode the cap legally, 177 or 22 percent of all municipalities were able to do so, DiNapoli’s office said.
For the local governments that couldn’t get the levy under 2 percent, the comptroller’s auditors worked with ten municipalities to take “correction action” and save local taxpayers from being improperly billed $280,000.
Still, the major caveats for all this tax cap is that school districts are yet to calculate their own budgets and determine how to stay within the limit. In school districts, budgets are not approved until the spring and it takes 60 percent of local voters to override the cap.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has spun this a democratic initiative, namely that voters have more of a say over their taxes than ever before.
