This Daily News blog post quotes Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as saying the agreed-upon property tax cap will expire in five years.  If that’s true, the cap is not worth the paper it’s written on–since, as explained here and here, one house of the Legislature will be able to kill the cap in five years merely by doing nothing.  In the meantime, the cap will partially exclude skyrocketing pension costs. So during the five years the two percent cap is in existence, it will reach 4 to 5 percent (or perhaps even more) in some places–mainly the poorest places with the highest effective tax rates.  And then, before it can have much of an effect, it will be as good as gone. 

If — and again, at this writing (4 pm) the key word is if — these reports are true, Governor Cuomo has failed to deliver on his main campaign promise.   And in that case, Senate Republicans must have helped to make the failure possible, since they could have continued holding up a rent control deal until the cap was right.

Silver wins again (maybe?). And if this is a false alarm, perhaps someone with access to the actual bill copy will be willing to share it.