Clarkstown's Property Taxes

The taxpayer is someone who works for the government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination - Ronald Reagan

Having recently sold my home in Clarkstown after living there for almost 28 years, I felt glee in the fact that it sold for almost 250% more than I paid for it after including in the cost of major improvements.

However, upon reviewing old tax documents in my files, I realized that although the value of my home increased by 250%, the property taxes (including school taxes) had increased almost 400% over the same period. What would the increase have been had I not filed tax grievances several times and received reductions in assessment value?

As anyone looking to buy a home knows, the cost of ownership includes the mortgage payment, insurance and real estate taxes.  Currently, interest rates for mortgages are at generational lows with rates lower than my parents paid when they purchased their home in 1954. Insurance rates have held steady - home insurance is a small but necessary cost.

The elephant in the room is Clarkstown’s rising real estate taxes.

Clarkstown real estate tax rates are a negative factor in the value of all properties in the town and for that matter in the county.  Not only are the high rates taking money from your weekly paycheck, they are stealing value from you in the loss of equity of your home.

The S&P/Case-Shiller Home price Indices for the period through May 2013 of 20 major markets shows that the New York Metro region had the lowest increase in value of home prices from the lowest point of 5.1% of all the 20 regions. The only other region with a single digit increase was Cleveland. Other regions had over 40% increases - even Detroit had a 31.5% increase!  Detroit is bankrupt and as you may have learned from this blog, Rockland County is insolvent and Clarkstown will become insolvent in 2013.

Take some time to understand the difference between insolvency and bankruptcy – the first precedes the second and to avoid the second someone has to pay – that someone is you.

I am a retired certified public accountant but one doesn’t need to be a financial genius to figure out that the high property taxes in Rockland County and in Clarkstown in particular are now penalizing every resident twice  - you are penalized once by having to pay property taxes that are so high they place Clarkstown in the rank of third highest taxed county of the 3,141 counties in the United States - you are penalized twice by having the equity in your homes stolen from you by the politicians who are taxing you, depleting your reserves, and adding costs they can not cover to Clarkstown’s bonded debt.

I have now left Clarkstown.  I leave the rest of you with a piece of advice:

Pay attention to what is going on in Clarkstown – after all it is your money that the Clarkstown Town Board is burning. 

This article was written by Mark Brenner who is a retired CPA. This blog is authored by Michael N. Hull, a retired senior citizen who writes opinion pieces on local political issues. He is a Director of Clarkstown Residents Opposing Patronage with Tom Nimick and Ralph Sabatini.  Hull contributes periodically to the Facebook page Clarkstown: What They Don't Want You To Know.