EJ McMahon with the fiscally conservative Empire Center, who also testified, said the real issue is that the STAR rebate checks are poorly conceived. “That’s a really bad example of tax policy,” said McMahon, who praised lawmakers for agreeing to an actual tax cut for middle-class income earners. Read More
The Empire Center has updated its June report that ranked 2014 property taxes with 2015 data recently released by the state comptroller's office. Read More
While a report benchmarking property taxes across the state recently released by the nonpartisan Albany think tank the Empire Center showed that the Mohawk Valley finished in the middle of the pack as a region with a median tax rate per $1,000 of assessed value of $31.75, the rates among individual municipalities differ greatly. Read More
If you live in Schenectady, New York, then you have the highest effective property tax rate in the Capital Region, according to a new report out this week from conservative think tank, the Empire Center. Read More
With just three work days remaining in the legislative session, a number of bills that would loosen the property-tax cap await consideration in both houses. The pending legislative efforts range from small modifications to the cap formula to allow more spending without triggering the cap’s supermajority requirement, to doing away with the supermajority requirement altogether. Read More
Residents of the small Western New York village of Sloan had the highest effective property tax rate in New York, paying $64.46 per $1,000 of home value during 2014, according to the newest edition of Benchmarking NY, the Empire Center’s annual examination of local property taxes. Read More
“STAR was the first in a line of many gimmicks to address high property taxes without addressing the reasons for the high property taxes,” said Ken Girardin, spokesman for the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank in Albany. “The (tax relief) checks are a calculated effort to distract from the hard choices the state Legislature won’t make.” Read More
Twenty-nine of the 37 districts that sought to override the property tax cap were successful in yesterday’s school budget votes, as the majority of districts elected to limit their tax increases to the cap itself. Read More