From WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made last Friday when Brighton Town Supervisor Bill Maley made an announcement.

The town, Maley said, would be canceling its town wide property reassessment.

The move came after much public outcry.

As reported by Sky news, hundreds of Brighton homeowners challenged their assessments or reassessments.

Some said they saw their home values double.

The town canceled the assessment process since, as Maley said, it could not accommodate the number of challenges.

The debate over assessments is as hot as the local real estate market.

Recently on this program, president and CEO of the Greater Rochester Association of Realtors, Jim Mearkle said that ten years ago, there would have been roughly 3000 homes on the market in the greater Rochester region.

Today, there are 500.

Jaco says Rochester is now the worst housing market in the country.

In regards to supply versus demand, with supply as low as it is.

Home prices are rapidly rising, leading to changes with assessments and the tax burden.

Town leaders and gates are holding two public information sessions about its reassessment process this week.

Meanwhile, in Henrietta, Town Supervisor Steve Schultz has been answering homeowners questions about assessments, the rise in home prices, and concerns about a shifting tax burden.

Schultz says the assessment process is broken, needs an overhaul.

So how would he do it?

What questions or concerns about assessments do you have wherever you live?

This hour, we're going to try to talk as much as we can to answer your questions about how assessments work, property tax laws and what homeowners ought to know about their situation.

And I'd like to welcome our guest, the Henry out of town.

Supervisor Stephen Schultz is with us.

Steve, thank you for making time for the program today.

My pleasure.

And in studio, Brian Sharp is investigations and enterprise editor for Sky news.

Thank you for being in the studio here.

Thank you.

Gino Fanelli, thanks for coming down one floor investigations and city hall reporter for Sky news.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And you know, Gina, you and I on this program talked a lot about your reporting, the teams reporting on the Rochester reassessment, which got a ton of attention.

So in a sense, I get a little surprised that there is drama.

I mean, there's going to be drama.

But any surprise that towns may have and I'm not, you know, I don't know what Supervisor Maley is dealing with.

And I'm sure there's a lot of, hullabaloo trying to get things lined up and and communicated well.

But is there any surprise that you have that there's, there are towns dealing with this level of either backlash or controversy?

not particularly.

And I'd say for two reasons.

One, as we saw in the city of Rochester and probably throughout the show, and we'll be referring to the Rochester reassessment a good bit because it was a real harbinger of what was kind of to come out of the suburbs around it.

But, there were very large increases, that were not limited to the city of Rochester.

So, when Greece did its assessment, then when Brighton did its assessment, you saw these really, really large increases.

And two weeks ago when, I reported on the Brighton assessment, we had one guy who had his house go up by half $1 million.

it almost tripled in value.

in assessed value.

And so that's one thing.

Just the sheer numbers are shocking to people when they see them.

But the other part, too, and we saw this a lot with the Rochester reassessment, is, a lot of people don't really understand how assessments work.

And educational campaign is a very key portion of how, you know, you do an assessment and so there is always confusion about what it actually means, what the impact is going to be.

And then, as I think Steve could talk a little bit more about, because I was reading through some of his notes on this and I, sometimes, and pretty often the way the assessments are set up is that they disproportionately impact, more traditionally lower valued houses.

And, then we can get more into like, some of the concerns with that.

But I think there's, you know, a trifecta of reasons there of, how suburbs, as they were doing their reassessment could have expected this kind of backlash and this reaction to what happened.

And in Brighton, you saw the average house double in assessed value.

So, yeah, that number was going to be something that struck people a little hard.

Well, sure.

I mean, in Rochester, if I'm remembering your reporting correctly, it was an average value increase of 60, 65%.

6667.

Isn't that right?

Right.

68 and that was eye opening for people.

So to see.

Oh, 100% increase is, you know, I mean, I can understand why people are shocked.

so in Brighton, my understanding, Brian and Gino, is that a tentative assessment role will be issued May 1st.

Is that what's happening, Brian?

Yeah, they're essentially they're going to go back to what they had.

If you made major improvements, your home value will reflect that.

but otherwise they haven't done a reassessment since 2018.

So those numbers have generally carried forward.

So they're going to stick with that.

And then when I talked to the supervisor, their supervisor mainly he had said because the question is, well doing it again or going back at this process and another year or two or whenever it is, you're still going to see that increase.

What is going to be different and kind of what Gino's touched on.

and the supervisor there will be talking, I'm sure about is this his thing was we got to do more messaging up front.

he thought they did some, obviously it was clear to do more and then leave themselves a longer runway.

because the goal is to get it right, have people have, you know, faith in the process and make sure people are have their values that they feel are reflective, and, and go forward from there.

And they just had they had 1000 slots for challenges and a waiting list of hundreds.

And they had left themselves about, you know, six weeks.

Wow.

And just as an example of that, I want to grab this Philip, phone call from Philip in Brighton who wants to just describe his story.

What happened with you, Philip?

So, one week before the deadline, for the informal review, we got the letter in the mail.

I get packages from China faster than I got this letter because, it was dated March 1st.

and, we were shocked.

I mean, our house, we bought our house in 2004 for 180,000.

And then the last assessment, and it's been adjusted because of, you know, the, the amount, I guess they kind of take that into account.

It was 225 K, and now I'm sitting in a 487 K Palace.

It went from 10 to 25 for 87.

Yes for 87.

And that number, I mean, I understand that we're only paying a portion of a pie and what the other assessments all about is how much of a percentage of that portion you're paying.

But the number that got me and I really just I can't tell you whether it's real or not, but it was the estimate, number of what you will pay and increased, tax.

Taking all this into account, assuming nothing else changes, was $2,005 a year and we're already paying.

That puts us at 12 K, seven, you know, 7 to 8000.

And that's for our school district that likes to put an astroturf on, school fields.

And they wanted gold bricks for the sidewalk.

The school district, they get it in this town.

I mean, they just approve everything.

And, $2,005 more, considering our income, our, you know, and our expenses and things, that's a number that makes us take advantage of that property value because we'd have to sell and move.

And that's the problem I've lived on.

On what avenue my entire life.

I'm 57 years old.

these property value increases.

They're really nice when you sell.

But I don't want to sell.

I don't want to move.

I like it here.

I've been here all my my entire life, and, I can't really take advantage of that wonderful property value unless I borrow against it.

and what it does is it puts people like me at risk of being.

I guess it's gentrified right out of the town because it's simply becoming unaffordable to live here.

Assuming that $2,005 number is right and taxes are already astounding here in the town.

and by the way, that informal review, I immediately jumped on it to try and, you know, okay, what do we need to do?

This is an all hands on deck situation.

And basically for that informal review, you need to show up with appraisals and repair estimates.

Because I'm telling you right now, my house is not appreciated in the eyes of that degree because we haven't made any major changes.

We have.

I have a kitchen that has a wet bar in it, and that tells you 1980 so well, so, you know, it's just it puts people like me, you know, into a really difficult situation.

Yeah.

And I want to say to Phil, first of all, thank you for sharing what's going on with you and Phillip story.

So going from buying at 180 in 2004, reassessed to 225.

And then this reassessment goes from 225 to 487.

That is higher than the average by a little in Brighton.

But it's not.

The highest reassessment you heard in your reporting is that, you know, no, it's not, I mean, we saw one that was about, it went from around 250 K original assessed value to I think it was 826 is where it ended up.

It's not a particularly I mean, nice house.

Not particularly remarkable.

They hadn't really done anything to it.

So, if Brighton is California people are going to move.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's under the assumption people are, actually moving to Brighton in droves.

which, I don't know, it's the case.

Well, I don't know.

So in a second we're going to get.

And we had a perspective here.

Brian Sharp, anything to add here?

I mean, I think it's important to note here, I already have emails people saying, well, shouldn't towns just say we're not going to reassess?

You know, people don't want it, so just don't do it.

So that's gone.

Brian looked right over and said, you got a supervisor.

He's going to answer that question.

but Brighton is going to move forward with more communication on this and a spring roll out here of this assessment process.

Yeah.

Well, essentially, I mean, they've got to certify a roll and so they will go ahead, like I say, sort of largely staying static and making adjustments for, you know, major improvements was what I was, was told.

And that this is, this is done for this year and they'll, they'll regroup and come back at a future time.

But yeah, the supervisor Schultz here can talk a lot more about sort of the process.

And you know what what other options there might be.

So I'm going to give it over to Supervisor Steve Schultz of the town of Henrietta.

I want you to describe what's happened in Henrietta, how you see the assessments.

Overall, I think people are curious to know your thoughts about your neighbor, rush, which, you know, tried to intervene in its own way with reassessments.

Can you take us through all of that?

Sure.

So, you know, a couple misconceptions that you always hear about assessments is that it's a money grab.

Raising assessments does not bring in one penny more for a municipality, nor does lowering assessment bring in one penny less.

As was stated earlier, the assessments divvy up the tax levy.

The tax levy is set at budget time.

In fact, when schools put their budgets together, the assessment rolls aren't even done, so they can't possibly know what the assessments are going to be.

they are two separate things.

The problem with the current system and with this current market is it's shifting the tax burden from the higher end homes to the lower end homes.

And that's because the lower end homes are are rising faster.

So, you know, I went and pulled a bunch of homes, from real estate looking at ones that have recently sold.

So we're working with real numbers.

This is what they actually sold for, not what someone said they're worth.

Yep.

This is what someone was willing to pay for them.

And so, like a mid-level home, you know, from in any of the homes from like the 2000 through 2018.

So for instance, this one house over that 18 years, it grew 4%.

That's it, 4% in value from 2018 to 2022.

So now a four year span they grew by 45%.

This is in Henrietta.

This is in Henrietta.

Yeah.

Over the last two years it grew by 72%.

So, what it actually sold for of.

No, that's it's sold for 72% higher than it was valued two years ago.

And these aren't theoretical is what it's actually selling.

This is what it's all that.

So when they bought the house it they bought it for 125,000.

It sold for over 290.

So that's an entry level home.

meanwhile you have a mid-level home.

They bought it for 227,000.

It just sold for 429.

So that's more 90 to 90 between 90 and 100% increase over that life of the span.

But you know, in terms of the the growth, you know, so that's that's over six years.

That's a six year growth.

That's not unusual.

That's essentially what Brighton is seeing now.

So it is what the market is doing.

But it it's you know the the challenge you've got is there are people overpaying for homes.

So my cousins children just been they've spent three years looking for a home.

They would constantly get outbid.

So what a lot of these buyers do, they take the money.

They were going to put on a larger home, and they put that same money down for a smaller home.

And that's the only way they can get a home.

The songs come in and they've been over asking.

They have to bid over asking.

You know, when we bought the house across the street from us for my father in law was, assessed at 130,000.

It was listed for 170,000.

And the only reason we got is we had an escalator closet went up to 185,000.

Without that, we wouldn't have gotten the house.

And the other thing that's happening is because you've got these real estate, firms that they're, real estate venture firms, they're buying houses and turning them into rental properties.

They're coming in with fully non contingent offer.

So if you want to buy a house you have to waive your right of inspection.

And you know, the real estate investment firms can get away with that.

Because if they lose one house it might be one out of hundreds.

If it's your only house and you buy a house that has a real problem, that that's horrible.

That's something Albany could and should change today, that you cannot be forced to waive your right of inspection.

it's just, you know, like I said, the market's going crazy.

And so what we're seeing is that, you know, our average increase on this reassessment was 35%.

Ours is less than Brighton's because we up until recently have stayed at 100% valuation by doing partial reassessments.

And when the growth was low, you could get away with that.

But with the growth like this, you can't because you know, if I'm growing, 45% in one year, then anyone who wasn't reassessed, they're getting a 45% discount essentially on their taxes.

It's just not fair.

So we've had to switch to a cyclical recycle.

And to answer the question, the penalty for not, reassessing is something called an equalization rate penalty.

So what that does is it changes.

It increases all your tax rates.

So if you go out to the county has all the the town tax rates out there, folks in Webster pay close to $10 per thousand on their county tax bill, whereas in Henrietta it's around five.

The reason is they haven't reassessed in forever.

So they get penalized for it.

They get penalized for that.

And that, that, that change not only increases your tax rate, but it also reduces any exemptions you have on your house.

So a senior who might have a senior limited exemption in in Webster, they're only getting 52% of that exemption.

What happened in rush.

So in rush the town board voted to overturn the assessment.

after a lot of outcry, after a lot of outcry.

And that's not legal.

as elected officials, we cannot change the assessment.

It's the assessor who has to make that decision, and we change the assessor.

About a year and a half ago.

And when she came in, we were talk.

There was talk about doing a reassessment last year in Henrietta.

And she basically said, you know what?

We're not we're not set up for it.

This is going to be a massive effort.

it's going to be all kinds of problems.

And so she's had her team spend the year getting ready for this reassessment.

Now, we have what's called a coordinated assessment program.

So the same assessor that serves Henrietta also serves brush.

And so she put all this stuff together.

They had all the informal they got the packages out, they got the information out there.

Still people who they don't read in the post I had put that explained that this is our first town wide that we've done in in two decades.

They said no, the town reassessed right in and I said, we do partials, you know, so people unfortunately don't always read.

You can only educate so much.

But, you know, it's it's, there's nothing a politician, a town board member hates more than reassessment.

Because, again, I want to put a point on what the supervisor said.

If you see your assessment going up by 35% or 68% in Rochester or whatever it was, or 100% in Brighton, that does not mean your town just gets more money.

That's that's not how that works.

so a couple questions I have.

I want my colleagues to kind of run the show because Brian and Gino do such great work reporting on this, and we'll take your calls and emails as well, coming up here as we talk reassessments.

first of all, Mr.

Supervisor, I see a growing I know consensus is the word, but a growing opinion that in a lot of places in this country, including obviously, our region now, a big part of this problem is simply supply and demand and how hard it is to build new housing.

So you have regulations, something in place that makes it hard to build multifamily, to build new homes in general.

the, the home Association recently was on this program saying the same thing.

Do you agree with that assessment that we are now paying the price of not building enough new housing?

I can't speak for other towns in Henrietta.

We grew by 11%.

We would have actually grown by 17% if our genie, had enough power for us.

We have over a thousand units that are on hold right now because we can't get power.

why is that?

They allowed the capacity at our primary substation to reach zero additional capacity, and they haven't ordered the, they hadn't ordered that the new transformer come Covid, pandemic.

There's a huge backlog for them.

It's also they're competing with all these new computing centers, which are all, you know, whether it's AI or, cyber.

mining for, you know, Bitcoin and stuff like that.

those are generally have their own substations, so they have their own transformers.

The back, it's a four year, backlog on getting Transformers.

So right now we have, about 500 jobs on hold and over a thousand housing units on hold because there's just no power in general.

Do you think in this country it's too hard to build new housing?

there's a lot of places where that is true.

you know, you look at the, you know, one of the things I've found when we have, public hearings for new projects is the general sentiment.

And they don't come out and say this, but now that my house is built, we don't need any more homes in town.

Right?

Sure.

I want to preserve, you know, you know, one of the ones that killed me, we had a development that was done in three stages in the folks from stage two were complaining about stage three, that it was going to displace the deer.

Well, what do you think your house did?

Right?

you know, we work hard to preserve the, the feel of the town, but we've also worked hard to find where can we put those, those housing units.

So for instance.

Right.

a lot of people say we need affordable housing.

People don't want them in their backyard, often referred to as Nimby.

Not in my backyard.

So where do we put them?

Well, you got the marketplace mall, which is going down.

So we put a worked with cornerstone Group and they put an affordable, senior housing project, the marketplace senior housing, right in the mall.

There's it's not anybody's backyard.

Nobody complained about it.

Oh, by the way, the first day they open that up for sign up, they reached 150% capacity on day one.

So we need more of those.

it's, you know, it's a challenge, to find where they can go.

And again, the problem we're facing right now is getting them power.

So what would you do if you were redesigning the assessment system?

How should this go?

The it just get away from market value.

So rising market value is not a reason to raise someone's share of the taxes.

And again you know I want to stress we don't get additional taxes.

But it does change how much weight right.

And I'll use an example.

So going back to I mentioned we bought my father in law's house.

It went from a 180,000 to 300,000.

That's a 66% increase.

My house, which I built after the sale of my company, went from 650,000 to 850.

And I'm just rounding the numbers to make the math easier.

That's a 30% increase.

Our average increase was 35%.

That means my tax burden on the large home is going to come down by a couple hundred dollars.

My tax burden on the small home is going to go up by $1,000.

And that's assuming that nobody increases taxes, which we already know isn't true because the school has a 4.2% proposed increase.

So it's shifting the tax burden from the large homes to the small homes.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm still paying three times as much taxes on the big home, but it used to be four.

And if you go back, six years, it used to be five x.

So it's shifting that tax burden to the people who can least afford it.

it's broken.

And even just the whole concept, you know, you can put ten real estate professionals in front of a house and say, how much is it worth?

And you're probably going to get ten different answers.

It's always going to create, you know, argument, confusion.

people don't understand how it works.

You always hear, well, I didn't make any improvements and my house went up that much.

Well, that's just because that's what the real estate market is doing, and that's what the law says.

You have to you know, we would love to be able to say, you know what?

Let's not raise the assessment as much on small homes.

We don't have that ability.

It's it's dictated by law.

So what would have to change for you to have for you to get the system you want.

So it would have to change in Albany.

Yeah.

and basically what I would love to see it go to is a formula based off of measurables.

Right.

Square footage, living area, square footage, non living area, things like basements, garages, sheds acreage number, bedrooms number, bathrooms, linear of lake frontage for those who have it.

And you just put different weights on these things.

And so what happens is I put all the forum stuff in for my house and it spits out a number and that's my assessed value.

It doesn't need to be dollars, it's just some number to compare the homes.

Well, now what happens if I don't change my house?

My assessment doesn't change.

Reassessments go away forever in Henrietta.

That would save half $1 million a year, because that's how costly it is to do reassessments, you know, between salaries and up.

The professional folks, we have to pay to help with the process.

And then, of course, all the commercial properties file surgery, lawsuits fighting their assessments afterwards.

We have to fight all those in court.

and that's just one town.

There's over 900 towns in New York state.

Now, granted, we're a larger town and small towns don't pay that much.

But you know, you're probably looking at across the state hundreds of millions of dollars in savings.

And that doesn't even get to the state who has all these offices, a real property tax services, who will review every single municipality in the state to determine the level of assessment.

That's what.

And they're the ones who assign that, penalty so that when taxes, that cross town borders, they're done equally because again, using Webster as an example, they haven't reassessed it forever.

They're at 52% level of assessment.

We're at 92%.

Some towns are at 100%.

It wouldn't be fair to to have the same tax rate.

Okay.

Any support in Albany for your idea?

I don't know yet.

I've gotten I've gotten to some people's ears.

You know, unfortunately, right now it's budget time.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah, getting on their, schedule is is difficult, but, I've definitely been having a number of of, you know, conversations with Senator Jeremy Cooney.

I can tell you what I hear all the time from all the residents is, how can we help?

How can we get this message to Albany?

And there's even stuff that they might be able to potentially do to help with the the situation right now, it would only help seniors, but that that, there's a senior limited income benefit.

Now you can't change who's eligible and have it affect this year because there's a taxable status date of March 1st.

But one of the things they could potentially do is there's three income tiers.

And the lowest tier you get for 20%, reduction in your assessed value.

The mid tier is 10% and the lowest tier is 5%.

They could double all those so that seniors unlimited income who who they don't won't have the means to pay the the larger share of taxes.

They could get a greater deduction this year, but they would have to pass that in time.

The final roll goes out July 1st, so it has to be in place.

I would say probably by the end of May.

so that the towns can implement that and folded into their role calculations.

Right.

I was just going to jump in when he was talking about the, you know, Webster at 52%.

Henriette.

It just for perspective, if folks are curious, Brighton's at 65. and if you're East Siders thinking Penfield parent and Fairport.

Pittsford you're all right around that 65 or less.

60 to 66.

Right in that general area.

So, just if people are wondering like, well, where do I fall?

Okay, what else stands out to you?

You know, finally, I think, everything that, Supervisor Schultz has said is very refreshing.

I, I've had, a lot of conversations with, different local leaders about, assessment, and you often really get the response and not trying to call anyone out in particular, but like, well, why are the assessments going up this amount?

I mean, how do you justify, 100, 130% increase, in a neighborhood?

And it's like, wow, people just love it here.

The food's great.

The the, the that's a good location, good schools, whatever it might be.

And like, well, you also have to factor in and probably much, much larger factor that we have an aging housing stock in this area.

There's not that much development.

And single family homes in the in Monroe County itself, until you get out into the, you know, further out suburbs.

couple that with, speculative real estate investment, particularly spiking up during Covid with a lot of real estate investors buying up properties for rentals here, this had a massive impact on the market.

And when you look at, okay, I'll go back to Rochester.

When we did our reassessment and the the neighborhood that saw the biggest increase was, in Beachwood, Garrison Webster Avenue, a little bit east of the public market.

Not that remarkable of a neighborhood.

as far as any kind of development happening there, 137% increase.

Those are the people that are going to people that own homes.

They're the ones who are going to see the largest increase in their taxes as a result of this large spike for lower valued homes.

and it raises the question of what exactly is driving that.

And I would argue that, yeah, the lack of stock is part of it.

And the investment marketplace is a massive contributor to the, the local home sales contributing to that assessment increase.

Yeah.

I mean, so again, the math matters here.

We try to do very little math on this program.

But if you own $1 million home and your reassessment is now $100,000 higher, so now it's 1.1 million versus if you have a $100,000 home and it goes up $100,000 to 200,000, the lesser valued home is now paying a lot more in taxes.

The person who has $1 million home now, 1.1 million is going to have a slightly smaller tax bill.

So it's just based on the percentages.

And to your reporting on Beachwood, wasn't it, again, an eye opener for how this process is affecting people.

And so I will be curious to see what happens, you know, in Brighton as they kind of get ready to kind of redo this in May and try to communicate and go, well, okay, so they're not going to redo anything this year.

Yeah.

That's just that's the wrong word there.

Just thank you for sticking.

And I would just while I got the my is the one thing I would say is I think what the supervisor points out, you know there should be more of an appetite in Albany.

I mean, the governor is going around how many times affordability, affordability.

It's the affordability agenda.

Well, you could start here.

and shifting to folks who are trying to get started, you know, and, and penalizing them the most.

and I would just say, though, also like, we bought our house, we bought in Brighton right before the pandemic, like months before, this issue of waiving the exemption or waiving the inspection and, people willing to pay cash only, it was tough to get in then.

And that's what we confronted was and this was an individual buyer cash only waive the inspection.

Now I'll just take the house and and so I can only imagine trying to get in there now.

So Miss supervisor go ahead.

Yeah.

So one of the things that towns can do and we have implemented this, you know, one of the things that why you're seeing the entry level homes, increase as well is they're not built new ones.

Right.

I grew up in a town, a baby boomer town.

All the homes were 900 to 1100 square foot.

They're all building 2000 plus square foot homes.

Because from a builder standpoint, there's more profit in it, right?

If you think about it, that the cost to bring the water, sewer, road, sidewalk, all that is the same regardless of the size of the house.

if I can get more from the sell the house, I'm going to turn better profit.

You know, one of the things the governor has always said, well, just double the density everywhere.

She had proposed that for a while to try to, you know, encourage new building.

While the problem is some of these neighborhoods, the infrastructure couldn't support it.

There's a lot of these sewers you try to put double the number of, you know, whether it's auxiliary dwelling units, the sewers aren't going to be able to handle it.

But the other thing that will happen is even if it's cheaper for the house to build, they're always going to sell at market value.

A developer's not going and say, you know what, I saved $50,000 on this home.

So I'm going to sell at $50,000 under market value.

That's not going to happen.

They're going to pocket that difference.

So what the towns can do and again we've done this is we have incentives for people to build smaller homes.

So you have your standard densities and we increase the density if you're willing to build a smaller home.

So we just had somebody who, instead of building a 120, 200, or 2000 square foot homes, they're going to build over 220 homes that are all less than, 1200 square feet.

And they're going to have a first floor bedroom so that they're also good for seniors who are looking to downsize.

So you, you know, towns can put that incentive into their into their zoning to make it, you know, to essentially encourage these developers because one of the things you can do then is, you know, everyone likes the big wide open neighborhoods with the spread apart.

Again, where I grew up, it was maybe 20ft between homes, just wide enough for a driveway and a five foot strip of grass.

but what that does is that brings down the cost, because again, now that's that much less water, sewer, electric road, sidewalk per house.

So, that's how you can encourage the builders if, if they can get greater density, they will build smaller houses because they can then make the money on it.

we're going to take Bill and Lisa's phone calls in just a second here.

And we got to get our only break.

The irony.

We'll come right back to your phone calls as we talk reassessments Brian Sharp and Gina Fanelli from WXXI news have been leading the reporting on this.

And maybe where you live.

It has been I don't know if controversial is right word or just difficult challenging.

We are seeing assessments increase at rates that for a long time people have said would be unsustainable.

Well now the question is what do you do with this?

Should you challenge it.

So we'll talk to the supervisor more.

because probably the system doesn't become the Steve Schultz system overnight, although maybe Albany will appoint him the the reassessment czar in the future.

but he's the supervisor of the town of Henrietta.

He's joining us as well.

Your phone calls on the other side of this break.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Thursday on the next connections, a conversation that, frankly, none of us really wanted to have around here.

We are saying goodbye to news director Randy Gorman, who is retiring at the end of this week, a much deserved retirement after a remarkable career in journalism.

We'll talk to Randy about that career, about what he most fondly remembers, what he's looking forward to in retirement.

Thursday.

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No surprise we've got a lot of comments on the subject.

Bill in Rochester first.

Hey Bill, go ahead.

Yeah.

Earlier you were saying that just because you're generating more revenue from the increased assessments, that doesn't mean that there's extra funds.

Are going to the town.

where are they going if they're not going to the town or the county or the state?

Yeah.

The answer, Supervisor Schultz explained there is not extra revenue.

overall, there's a there's a rebalancing of who's paying what.

Your supervisor.

The easiest way to think of it picture a pie, a pizza pie.

When I, set the tax levy, I determine the size of that pizza.

So let's say it's now a 16 inch pizza, and I have to cut it up amongst 16 people who are going to eat the pizza.

If I make one of those slices bigger, that person gets more pizza, but I'm not creating more pizza.

The other slices have to get smaller.

So if for everybody who's, portion of the taxes went up, somebody else's portion of the taxes went down.

Ultimately, when you add it all up, the changes equals zero.

and, you know, again, it's set by the tax levy, the tax levy set during budget time is what determines how much we collect, not the not the assessments.

Assessments determine how big a portion you pay.

Unfortunately, the sheet that comes out that gets mailed out to everybody, that's dictated by the state and it has a because it does say this is how much more you will pay in taxes.

And people think, oh, well, the the town or the school is getting that extra taxes.

That's not the case.

It should say this is how much bigger your share of the taxes will be, which I think, and maybe it's something that you would send.

Oftentimes when there is a reassessment the tax rate goes down.

Yeah.

So so for five years in a row we held our tax rate or our tax levy flat.

We charge the same tax levy all five years.

Our tax rate went from $1.40 per thousand to $0.98 per thousand.

over those five years, because the home values were still growing.

But the tax levy was the same, therefore.

And when you map it out, you see the tax levy is a straight line.

The assessed values ramp up.

The tax rate ramps down at the exact same angles.

does that answer the question?

Bill?

it was confusing, right?

Because you would expect that the average assessments going up, say, 30%, that the revenue should go up 30%.

But you're saying, no, that's not the case.

The revenue stays flat even though the assessments are going up 30%.

Right?

I'm not saying that the whether the assessment let me rephrase it.

If if they tax.

In other words, what's the relationship between increased assessment and the overall revenue.

Zero.

so so so then so then the the the overall revenue may be the same even though assessments are higher.

Right?

Correct.

Correct.

And conversely, that's and that's hard.

That's hard to, figure out.

It is conversely the the the levy or the assessments could go down.

But if they raise the levy your taxes will go up.

Now again, what happens is, you know, unfortunately what we're seeing is as we've talked about.

So in Henrietta, the average rate is 35%.

If your house increased at a rate greater than 35%, your share will get larger.

If your house increased by less than 35%, your share will get smaller.

When you add it all up, it's the same, you know?

but again, how much we collect in taxes is set at budget time.

Yeah.

And it's, kind of important to note here, too, that they're the 2% tax cap overall.

So municipalities can't just, if their assessment value goes up 68% of the residential properties, they can't just increase the tax levy, to get 68% more revenue.

They legally cannot do that to begin with.

So it's all just shift between properties of who's paying what and at what rate they're paying.

yeah.

So they're very there really is very little connection between that and revenue.

All right.

Let's see if that, if that settles it for bills, that better.

Yeah.

Thanks a lot.

Yeah.

Bill, thank you for the comment.

By the way.

Bill's comment question is probably the single most common one on this subject.

And it was a really good one.

Thank you.

Bill Lisa in Rochester next.

Hi, Lisa.

Go ahead.

Hi.

you've got, inner ring suburbs, people there for the most part, that you were talking about, for their towns.

I'm wondering if part of the investor, issue, the investor part of this that I think Jeremy mentioned is the short term rental market because, like, in the South wedge, Highland Park and swill burg areas, in the last five years, we've seen a huge number of houses not just bought by investors that were previously owner occupied, but investors who are, turning them into short term rentals.

They're not buying in Brown Croft or in the very large house, range.

They're they're buying in the in the the medium range that mostly are seniors.

and so I'm wondering if that's part of what you're seeing.

The city is, looking to change its laws, potentially to allow more short term rentals.

And, and I'm wondering if you all are experiencing the same investor interest in your medium size and smaller homes.

okay.

Supervisor Schultz, we haven't seen a ton of it.

And, Henry and I'm not saying that it's not existing, but I've not seen that as being the major.

The big issue, you know, part of it is our tax rates are the lowest in the county, other than Riga, which has the landfill pay their, property taxes.

we, you know, we're just seeing a lot of people who want to move to the town, including folks from downstate who, now that they can work remotely, are saying, why am I living downstate where there's all these issues?

I'm going to move upstate?

but I do know that there are other towns in the city who are facing what she's talked about.

I don't know if either you gentlemen have seen anything about that.

I don't know about town.

I mean, I used to live in the South Wedge, and I know we saw that happening on our street.

I mean, it's another set of buyers.

and, you know, I think in the South wedge, particularly in just years past, you would see that area was one of the fastest, increasing, areas.

You're right by the university, of course.

So short term rentals would make sense for investors wanting to do that.

Okay.

Do you know anything to add?

Yeah.

I mean, that's my neighborhood.

I live there, South Wedge Highland area and, yeah, I mean, there definitely are a lot of short term rentals that are popping up a lot of the student housing, too, that they turn, you know, family residential housing into like units for like 4 or 5 students to live in.

so, so I was interpreting short term rental, more like the, Airbnb and verbal and that type of thing though.

That's right.

Yeah.

That's it.

Yeah.

I mean, if we're talking students, we do have that problem.

We have a number of folks who buy up houses in, you know, family, residential neighborhoods, turn them into senior high or student housing.

and that not only takes them off the market, it also then creates conflicts between college students who might want to party and families who are raising young kids and want it to be quiet at night while those kids are sleeping.

unfortunately, you know, I, I would love to be able to.

There was talk about allowing towns to do this that you could designate in your zoning to say, this is a family neighborhood and it's owner occupied only, unfortunately, you can't we we don't have the authority to do that.

that would help with that problem.

Absolutely.

All right.

let's go as fast as we can.

We have a lot of feedback here.

Matthew and Henrietta.

Next.

Hello, Matthew.

Go ahead.

yeah, I think, the the previous caller hit on almost all of my questions.

So, I mean, it may have been completely answered by now, but I was kind of talking to the same point that in my neighborhood in Henrietta, quite a few of our residents are now owned by, like, absentee management companies.

And so when I look at their assessment values and their properties in general, they're in decline and their assessment value increases are not nearly as significant as mine.

You know, I put a quite a bit of money into to my property.

And I, you know, it's kind of a feeling that you're being penalized for being a long term resident and you're almost, you know, better off not being in that boat, you know, and having to pay that increase to make sure that that is one of the things in that piece I put in the town newsletter and identity that talks about some of the problems with the current system.

That's one of them.

You get you get penalized for keeping your property looking nice.

You let it go downhill.

You're going to pay less in taxes because they lower the condition.

it's it's not as valuable on the market.

That's 100% backwards from where it should be.

Right.

you should get a deduction, reduction in your taxes for keeping your property up and you and or potentially a penalty for letting it slide.

It's it's crazy.

And I'm just wondering, it's actually I don't know the answer to this.

So if you buy a house, carve it up into multiple apartments.

Does that then get assessed in a different way than it was when it was a single family?

typically they don't carve it up.

We don't have many houses big enough to carve up into multiple.

They just rent to 4 or 5.

Theoretically, they're only supposed to be able to rent to three.

What a lot of them do is only three are on the lease and the other one is a guest, you know, and of course, big things.

You know, one of the things I always talk about, we have great freedoms in this country with regards to, you know, no unauthorized search and seizure.

Well, that also creates headaches if you're trying to enforce this code.

Right.

We have no means to go in and inspect to see.

Are there really four people living there?

but yeah.

So the one thing that that there's a discount out there that's crazy.

We had this one neighborhood where they came, he came, got approval.

He was building all these homes.

He was going to sell all the homes.

Well, he turns out he didn't sell any of them.

He turned them into rentals.

Now he has said, well, it's essentially an apartment complex.

And those, for some crazy reason, condos.

There is a discount for condos in complexes as compared to regular homes.

So this guy is now paying who's making money off these houses, is paying less in taxes than if those individuals own their own houses.

That is completely backwards.

I just don't understand it.

We've taken them to court and unfortunately, a judge, ruled in his favor improperly.

So, for instance, it's a public road.

It's, you know, he basically came out the area that he's in doesn't allow for for multifamily.

And yet he's essentially gotten past zoning laws by swearing that he was going to sell all the homes and then turn around and rent to them all.

So, there's absolutely problems with the, with the current real property tax code in terms of that, it doesn't make sense to me that somebody is making profit off of a building.

If anything, anybody who buys that and turns around to rent, it's they should be paying more in taxes than the person just owned it for their own house talking assessments and reassessments.

So let's keep it moving fast here.

A lot to get to Jen in Rochester next.

Hi Jen.

Go ahead.

Hey, I had a question about, I'm not sure if if they can talk to the training that the assessors have.

I actually spoke to an attorney about my assessment, and it was sort of explained to me that the rate that my house was being assessed, that was at 110%, and it didn't really take it, had five flat, comparables.

None of them touched on the fact that, for example, my house actually backs right up to 590. so the comparables were compared to houses that had been prepped and ready for sale on the market when my house, I've lived in it for 15 years.

so is there assessor training by New York State?

Can you tell me about the assessor that you work with and how do they work for multiple towns and districts with such different and varying housing markets?

Thank you.

Jen.

Supervisor Schultz sure.

So, yes, there was extensive training.

In fact, our assessor, for years, was a, property appraiser.

her father had a business.

She grew up learning that she's been in, she was our, assistant assessor for years.

she, has been an assessor for many years.

Lots of training.

the one thing I will say, though, you know, so we have 12,000 homes.

We have 14,000 properties in Henriette alone that have to be reassessed.

The assessor cannot pick the comparables for each and every one of them when you're doing a town wide reassessment.

So there's something called mass appraisal software that makes those choices.

They're not always the best.

on our website, we have all the information in there as to all the different sales, how you can go about and pick different comparables.

that's one of the things that is the biggest thing that we see in the informal.

You come in with better comparable choices.

If she agrees those are better choices, she can change your assessment right there.

And if you're happy with the new number, you're done.

You don't have to file a formal grievance.

You know, unfortunately, that window is very small.

the schedule, the calendars dictated by the state.

And they don't have a lot of time between when the notices go out and when they have to wrap up in formals because they have to start putting together the preliminary tax roll that has to be out, by May 1st.

but even so, you can still challenge your comparables.

And we encourage everybody if your comparables don't make sense, challenge them because that that's one of the easiest things to do.

but, you know, you've got to pick ones that are the right sales.

And those are all online to make it easy for people.

I'm going to follow up that point in a second, Jen.

Thank you.

Good question.

Naomi, just briefly, this is like a yes or no for the supervisor.

Can towns across New York join together and put pressure on Albany to change to a real estate tax system, such as Steve suggests?

And should Steve be there?

Assessment czar I added the last part, but I don't know if I want to be the assessment, sir.

But yes, we can team together.

There is something called the Association of Towns.

we have talked to them about it.

they help push legislation.

The big thing is talk to your, legislator.

So your assembly member and your senator, tell them that this is a huge concern and that we need to see change in Albany.

And if you don't, we're going to primary.

you know, one of the things we always talk about is, unfortunately, where politics has gotten today, most people don't vote for the other party.

Well, then threaten them with that.

They'll be primaried out.

because, you know, it's got to change.

It really is broken, and it's going to drive people out of the state, and out of their homes.

Someone shouldn't lose their homes because they, they can't afford to pay taxes.

That's that's crazy.

All right.

Real briefly here, LW says lives in Henrietta.

Hearing our supervisor, I went to look online, and it looks as though the requirement for a professional assessment may have dropped.

You were saying that, you had to hire a professional like a contractor in order to file a grievance.

And it got very complicated.

He says we've missed the opportunity to file an informal request for review, but do you still have to do that in Henrietta?

so you can file a formal grievance without needing to, hire, you know, the three the three basic ways you attack your, the assessment one is choose different comparables.

The second is show that there are condition issues with your house.

It's an aging roof.

It's a sagging roof.

I've got a crack in the foundation.

I've got 1950s, kitchen and bathrooms, that kind of stuff.

And then the third one is a, professional real estate appraisal.

that one will cost money, depending on how much you think it's off, it may be worth it.

but, the other two don't cost money.

and again, if if you go on to the town website under government click assessors in the upper left corner, you'll see grievance information.

It's got all the forms that are needed to file your grievance.

It's got worksheets to help you do it.

It's got all the sales books so you can pick comparables that make the most sense.

They're organized by the type of, you know, is it a split level?

Is it, ranch, is it, you know, and so on.

I hear music playing.

We're playing?

Yeah.

Supervisor Schultz, supervisor Steve Schultz, of the town of Henrietta.

And perhaps the future assessments are of New York State.

Thank you for making time for the program today, Mr.

Supervisor.

My pleasure.

Great having you.

and, I want to say again, Brian Sharp corrected me, but I'm going to say it again.

follow Brian and Gina's coverage to understand what's going on with Brighton in their assessment.

10s.

they're starting again.

Again, this is starting a reassessment.

In another year or two, they'll go through this process for now.

They're essentially standing down your values might change if you made major improvements.

Otherwise, expect a new statement with a a back to more what you saw before.

Thank you guys.

Thank you Gina.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here Brian Sharp from all of us connections.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for watching.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Thank you guys.

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