Scenes from late summer

If you live in the Finger Lakes, you've probably doing  this right now.  A high ladder, stinging insects, and dangerous chemicals are involved, so proceed with caution, have Benadryl and an EpiPen on hand, and good luck!

Tax assessment pits county vs. county

Oswego

Among New Yorkers protesting their tax assessments we now find Cayuga County's government.  Cauyga County, it turns out, bought a piece of land in Oswego County, and is now suing to get its tax asessment reduced.  

Yes, taxpayers in Cayuga County will be forced to pay taxes on land they "own" in Oswego County.  Justin Murphy explains the convoluted confiscation in the Auburn Citizen.

The building at 11 River Glen Plaza, a former grocery store which the county bought May 16, is assessed at $2 million. By 2011 tax levels, that means about $102,000 in property taxes.

In a tax certiorari petition filed July 27, the county and JHMPAC, the entity from which the county bought the building for $950,000, asked an Oswego County judge to lower the assessment to $700,000, which would yield $35,850 in 2011 taxes.

“It’s part of a process you go through with any purchase,” Cayuga County Legislature Chairman Peter Tortorici said. “The assessment came in, I think, a little high, and we’re just going through the process to see if we can get it reduced.”

Government entities generally don’t pay property taxes, but Cayuga County does have to pay in this case because the property in question is outside county borders, according to an advisory opinion issued by the state Office of Real Property Services.

So highly paid experts toiling in our county governments can't agree on what a property is worth. What confidence can we then have in our own assessments?  For instance, this million dollar lakefront mansion in Seneca County was just reassessed at $194,000.  Sound a  little low to you?

Why we renovate

Greek Revival farmhouse in the Finger Lakes

Many Finger Lakes families live in ongoing renovation projects, as does Greg Sullivan in rural Maine.  If you've ever spent a frantic winter evening trying to find out where that damn water is coming from, you'll enjoy Greg's reports from Rumsford.  In his current piece at Right Network, Greg gets deep into why we do it.

Those who don’t care for civilization much don’t like single-family housing. They instinctively know it’s a counterweight to collectivism, and attack it on every front. Every home is a potential citadel of individualism. The sooner they can round up those bitter clingers, using anti-sprawl legislation and carbon-footprint arithmetic, and get them relying on the sanitation department to shovel their collectivized driveway and the mayor to salt their food, the faster we’ll all be happy, they think.

In our academic/trustafarian dominated corner of Central New York, every day seems to bring a proposal for more taxpayer-subsided "affordable" "worker" apartments.  One such project recently completed nearby appears to be having trouble renting all its units.  It could be that the developers need to read Greg's piece.  We suspect that many locals whose incomes are low enough to qualify for brand new, subsidized one-bedroom apartments might prefer to stay in their single-family Greek Revival, with the bad roof, the shallow well and the laid stone foundation that's been shifting since World War One.