How to Compare Tax Rates

Want to compare tax rates? Fortunately, NYS gives us a number of tools including these charts from the Office of Property Tax Services. Here, you can compare, for example, the towns in Nassau County:

 

While it may not be your largest tax bill, the Town of Oyster Bay is relatively high. Looking at these numbers reminded me of a Newsday article from September on the State Comptroller's audit of the Town of Oyster Bay. IT said, in part:

Oyster Bay’s Town Board needs to improve oversight after four years of improperly managing fund balances, according to a state comptroller's audit of the town’s financial health.

"The fund balance was not properly managed," the audit said, specifically pointing to the town’s practice of running deficits in some funds while having surpluses in others and risking an uneven tax burden among taxpayers.

 The article continues with this example:

Saladino’s first budget cut the town’s tax levy in 2018 by 0.5%, but some property owners saw their taxes go up. For example, county records show that town taxes on Venditto’s Massapequa home increased in 2018 to $2,258 from $2,157 the previous year, a 4.6% tax increase. In contrast, town taxes on Saladino’s home, which is in another part of Massapequa, decreased in 2018 to $1,831 from $1,918 in 2017, a 4.5% drop, county records show. Neither property’s assessed value changed during those years.

The reason for the difference was a sharp increase on a town garbage collection tax levy in 2018 that hit Venditto’s property but not Saladino’s.

Tax levies have at times appeared to be out of sync with how the corresponding funds have performed. Saladino’s 2018 and 2019 budgets cut the solid waste disposal district levy even as the deficit in that fund was growing, hitting $6.9 million at the end of 2019, according to town financial records. The town’s highway fund finished 2018 and 2019 with surpluses that grew to $6.1 million, but the 2020 budget hiked the town’s highway taxes.

 You can read the Comptroller's report in its entirety here.

Here's a larger version of the tax rate chart which includes Villages and Cities in Nassau as well

Of course, you can also compare school tax rates as well which we posted previously over here.