Rye’s Board of Assessment Review to
Hear Public on Annual Grievance Day

– By Mitch Silver –

On the third Tuesday in June, five Rye citizens from different walks of life will shoulder their annual responsibilities and gather at City Hall. For several hours during this single day, Board of Assessment Review Chairman Mark Gardner and fellow members Bob Byrne, Ed Collins, Debbie Davis-Gaillard, and Paul Denton will hear from City Assessor Noreen Whitty, as well as various members of the public protesting their tax bills.

Comprised of a CPA, a retired mortgage banker, a middle school science teacher (and IBM-er in a former life), a real estate developer and a practicing lawyer, the board functions “as a system of checks and balances for the Rye City Assessor,” said Gardner. “It’s like something out of Brigadoon, this small group of regular folks coming together on the Village Green to hear their neighbors.”

New York State, through its Office of Real Property Services (www.orps.state.ny.us), mandates that municipalities like Rye provide a formal grievance process each spring in which homeowners and commercial property owners alike may “grieve” their property taxes, either in person or through a representative, who may simply file the paperwork.

During the year, City Assessor Whitty and her staff update the assessments of parcels that are sold or undergo substantial changes to their value, usually after a home improvement. In Rye, all assessed values must equal 1.98% (the equalization rate) of Rye’s total real estate market value. Unlike Rye Town, Rye City has no city-wide reassessment each year, so market fluctuations like the current recession are not necessarily reflected in an individual property owner’s assessment and tax bill.

After Grievance Day, the Board — whose members have taken required courses on how to determine assessments —will meet for as many days during the summer as it takes to go through all the cases that were filed. The deadline for rendering a final decision is September 15. Even after that, dissatisfied property owners may challenge the Board’s decision before a hearing officer in Small Claims Assessment Review for a $30 fee.

In a departure from previous procedure, Ms. Whitty in April recommended, and the City Council unanimously approved, a change to the City’s property valuation date from May 1 of the current year to July 1 of the previous year. She testified that many communities in Westchester have already made the change, one suggested by the Executive Director of the Westchester County Tax Commission.

Thus, the “snapshot”, the valuation date of real property for 2009, is now what it was worth on July 1, 2008, not May 1, 2009. This change, of course, has the added effect of setting a home’s value for tax purposes before most of the precipitous slide in house prices over the past 11 months.

We asked Ms. Whitty — Rye’s Assessor for the past decade after doing the same job in Scarsdale for ten years before that — how many residents were expected to grieve their taxes this year. “Last year we had 181 filings. I expect as many or more by the 16th,” she said. “Quite a few properties are brought in by lawyers who specialize in grievances, many just before the deadline.”

We asked her if she had any advice for people who want to protest their assessment. “I think any homeowner who fills out the forms our office provides can, with our help, grieve their own taxes without a third party’s assistance. It takes some assembling of sales and other information, including comparable properties for the Board to consider. It’s not that difficult. Everyone wants to do what’s fair.”