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Nassau tax firms benefit from Mangano’s appeals reform program

Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano made no secret of the fact that two members of the panel he set up in 2010 to propose changes to the county’s property tax system owned businesses that stood to benefit mightily if the recommendations tilted in their favor.

They were owners of two of the county’s most politically connected residential tax-appeal firms and since 2009 they and five other firms specializing in representing homeowners have poured at least $1.8 million largely into Mangano’s campaign fund, other Republican committees and a political action committee they created.

What they got in the wake of the panel’s suggestions was a windfall.

Appeal firms — those representing homeowners as well as those representing commercial clients — have earned, conservatively, $502 million in fees since Mangano upended the tax system, largely following the committee’s recommendations, a data analysis by Newsday found. According to the analysis, that’s an estimated $167 million more than they stood to bring in under the old system, which some of the residential firm owners said was putting them out of business.

The involvement of the companies in shaping the program was among the early, defining moments in the protracted, politically infused overhaul of a system that apportions $6 billion in taxes annually, the effects of which have emerged in an 18-month Newsday investigation.

In saving the county between $115 million and $299 million since 2010, depending upon various factors analyzed by Newsday, the program shifted $1.7 billion in taxes over six years from those who successfully appealed their taxes to those who didn’t, including more than $790 million from owners of properties the county valued at $1 million or more before their reassessments.

It also benefited several of Mangano’s supporters — none more so than the tax firms, whose burgeoning profits were embedded in the program’s essential strategy. In a nutshell, this involved offering steeply reduced assessments on the great majority of appealed properties as an inducement to quickly settle tens of thousands of challenges every year. This would allow the county to slash the number of lengthy grievances that ended in budget-busting tax refunds being paid to victorious property owners. The firms have helped property owners appeal hundreds of thousands of times since 2010, winning far more cases than they ever have before and taking a solid piece of the action in the process.

Appealing was so advantageous, the Newsday investigation has revealed, that the typical owner of a home, condo or business who appealed is paying only $466 more in property taxes than in 2010, a 5 percent increase, while the typical nonappellant is paying $2,748 more, a 35.7 percent increase.

A look at how this occurred and who benefited reveals a sea change in the arcane bureaucracy surrounding Nassau’s property assessment system and a tax world turned upside down.

The dozens of tax-appeal firms that make up possibly the largest such industry in the country went from losing 63.1 percent of their challenges to winning 78.1 percent. Vilified for years as the cause of the avalanche of appeals that had come close to bankrupting the county, they morphed into the agents of reform, welcomed in the corridors of power.

Contentious court hearings where the county did battle with the firms and their clients have been replaced by confidential, closed negotiations that reach a blanket reduction in the assessment rates used to settle appeals.

With a lengthy assessment freeze replacing the annual assessment updates that, according to studies conducted by Newsday and state and local officials, had been keeping the tax rolls accurate, a third of the county employees associated with the process were let go. Hired to handle a grievance backlog was an appraisal firm tied to at least $542,700 in political contributions made since 2006 — nearly two-thirds of them to Mangano’s election fund and other Republican committees. Meanwhile, the firing of the workers and all nine members of the Assessment Review Commission, the initial arbiter of the claims, resulted in labor disputes, lawsuits and more than $600,000 in settlement costs.

Although voters approved a referendum in 2008 mandating minimum educational and professional requirements for the county assessor, less than three years later Mangano selected an “acting assessor” who lacked those credentials. He is a Republican who had once explored running for the job, and he still serves in an acting capacity.

Slipping into history in the process was the county’s effort to make the system fair and nondiscriminatory in accordance with a court-approved settlement order it signed in 2000. The agreement came after a study by the U.S. Justice Department determined that homeowners in predominantly minority areas of the county such as Freeport and Roosevelt were taxed at rates far higher than those who lived elsewhere. Newsday’s investigation determined the disparities have returned to the levels they were at before the county implemented the court-supervised reforms.

Mangano points to savings

Rather than being motivated by political concerns, Mangano said that his mission has been to target the county’s enormous cost of property tax refunds and clean up a contentious, poorly functioning system that needlessly cost taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

Under state law unique to Nassau, if a property owner wins a grievance after paying a tax bill, the county has to refund not only the money that it collected but also the money collected by all the nearly 300 school districts, towns and other authorities that rely on its assessments. Mangano said that means only 17 cents of every dollar it refunds are for the county’s own obligation.

The county had borrowed more than $1 billion to pay for refunds by the time he entered office in 2010.

“When you don’t settle it costs you 600 percent more. So, I definitely stand behind settling tax grievances,” Mangano said. “Not to do so would cost taxpayers significantly more money.”

Mangano said his reforms have saved $20 million to $30 million a year and the tax firms, which used to be paid the refunds directly by the county, were not pleased with the overhaul because they now have to bill thousands of homeowners each year for their services.

“I made it harder for them to get paid, because there is no refund,” Mangano said. “I don’t think any of those firms were happy with my reform, but they understood that I meant business.”

Beyond that, he said his biggest vision for reform was thwarted by an unsuccessful challenge to the state law known as the “county guaranty,” which requires it to shoulder the full refund burden, and the lack of action by the State Legislature on that and other legislative initiatives.

“I welcome anybody in the state who wants to help us pass bills that will correct the system,” Mangano said.

Nothing to lose in filing

Nassau’s property tax system is famously one of the most problematic and contentious in the country and when Mangano made it a piñata during his 2009 campaign he captured a surge of public disgruntlement.

Nassau County homeowners’ property tax bills have long been among the highest of any county in the nation, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Its disproportionate weighting of the tax burden to minority homeowners was so extreme that the county agreed to make deep reforms and meet high standards for accuracy and fairness in response to the 1997 lawsuit that won U.S. Justice Department support.

And the industry of tax firms that blanketed homeowners with invitations to appeal was supported by peculiarities of law that make New York virtually unique. There is no fee for filing a challenge. Homeowners are not required to provide supporting evidence. Grievance officials are not permitted to raise assessments even when their investigations show that’s what’s warranted.

In other words, there’s nothing to lose in filing a grievance. Even the fees paid to the tax firms are usually contingent on winning, something that is always a possibility when it’s easy to appeal negative decisions in court and appraisers are seldom in exact agreement over a property’s value.

But since the county guaranty was passed in 1948 in exchange for Nassau taking on assessment duties normally delegated to towns, there has been plenty for the county to lose, motivating it to build up a vigorous grievance system that was being pushed to its limits at the time of Mangano’s election.

To counter any illegitimate expense and maintain assessment accuracy, the county employed 225 people in its assessment department along with several others in the County Attorney’s Office. At the Assessment Review Commission, 47 more workers independently appraised properties filing appeals, which would be decided by its commissioners.

They were all kept busy as the number of challenges soared in the midst of a robust housing market that drove up values, a crash that undid them, and the annual assessment adjustments that were made to comply with the court settlement.

Property owners flocked to the appeal firms and challenges nearly doubled from 64,575 in 2003 to 127,479 three years later. They also voted to bring more professionalism to the assessment department by supporting a 2008 referendum that replaced the election of a county assessor with an appointed position that could only be held by someone who met a defined set of professional standards and would be shielded from the politics of elected office.

To this position, then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat, appointed Ted Jankowski, who had 28 years of experience and had successfully led Boston through its first reassessment in 38 years. Suozzi ordered a review of the system and in a May 2009 report Jankowski put much of the blame for the costly refunds on the tax firms, accusing them of overwhelming the system with frivolous claims for clients misled by firm mailers claiming thousands of assessments were substantially inaccurate.

The firms filed 92 percent of the more than 130,000 claims annually submitted in the three years before Mangano took office. If the Assessment Review Commission didn’t offer a reduction to their liking, they tried again with the courts. Most of the claims were found to be without merit. Only 36.9 percent resulted in a reduction, according to a Newsday review of the grievances. Cases settled by the commission were reduced by 10.1 percent on average. Homeowner appeals heard in small claims court resulted in just a 6.2 percent reduction on average.

Shalom Maidenbaum, who operates a group of companies that file about 21 percent of all claims made each year, bemoaned what he described as the Suozzi administration’s aggressive, anti-taxpayer tactics. He said it was rare for homeowners to get meaningful reviews of their cases and that if the county had acted efficiently it could have resolved the cases well before refunds would become necessary.

Speaking as much about those days as he is about criticism today, Maidenbaum said the bloated budgets of Nassau governments are the reason taxpayers find unfairness in the system.

“To blame taxpayer representatives for the present state of affairs is to miss the point entirely,” Maidenbaum said. “One may as well blame accountants for the perceived unfairness present in the income tax system.”

Maidenbaum told Newsday in 2015 the Suozzi-era policies were going to put him out of business.

“It wasn’t a fear,” he said. “It was a reality.”

A plan develops

On his first day in office, Mangano started his overhaul. He signed an executive order creating an assessment review team that would research solutions to the property tax refund problem and whether the county should adopt an assessment freeze that would hold values steady for a limited number of years.

Mangano’s review team was divided into two groups, one focused on residential property and the numerous appeals filed for them and the other on commercial property. It was the residential members’ recommendations that would most come to benefit appeal firms.

The seven largest residential firms formed a political action committee, Committee for Fair Property Taxes, just a couple months before Mangano was elected. As of November 2016, the seven firms, their officers and the committee had since 2006 contributed $1.8 million to various political organizations, including $330,300 directly to Mangano’s campaign and $1.3 million to other Republican committees, according to state campaign finance records. At a time when Suozzi was building his war chest — 2006 to 2009 — his campaign received $9,000 in donations connected to the firms.

More than a quarter of the contributions were tied to Maidenbaum, who said in a past Newsday interview he doesn’t focus on one political party but supports candidates who support the taxpayer.

“In America, you speak up if you have something on your mind or feel that you’re being unjustly targeted,” Maidenbaum said.

Mangano selected Maidenbaum for the review team. Also selected was Paola Orsini, who heads the seventh-largest residential firm, Re-Assessment and Evaluation Services, is a member of the Nassau County Republican Party Committee and is treasurer of the Committee for Fair Property Taxes. Similarly to Maidenbaum, Newsday found no contributions tied to Orsini to Suozzi’s political committee in state campaign finance records dating to 2006. She did contribute $11,500 to Mangano’s campaign, though.

The other residential team members had less assessment experience but were Republican donors, including William B. Wise, Village of Westbury trustee and then-commissioner of claims, who chaired it, and Garden City homeowner Robert Orosz, who had successfully challenged his home’s assessment.

Maidenbaum’s business partner, Ilyse Gellar Sternberg, said “we believe Mr. Maidenbaum was recommended and selected based on his high level of expertise.”

North Hempstead Receiver of Taxes Charles Berman, a Democrat who held several positions in the assessment department during the Suozzi years, said the decision to place tax firm representatives on the panel was “tantamount to asking the wolf to guard the hen house.”

“They basically wrote a report, you know, analyzing and stressing four or five things that came to pass,” Berman said. “Those are the things that have created the situation that we’re in today.”

Report’s recommendations

In their toughly worded November 2010 report, the residential team members said the county should “stop blaming the taxpayers and their representatives” and reassign resources spent defending cases in court to resolving them before they ended up in court, even if a private appraisal firm was needed to assist. It said the county could resolve cases more quickly by settling them all using lower, negotiated levels of assessment.

The premise that the county was defending large numbers of inaccurate assessments was questionable. The county had been assessing homes at the fraction of 0.25 percent, which gives a $100,000 property an assessment of $250. Tax firms argued the county had actually been assessing vast numbers of properties at lower rates, and that their clients were being unfairly discriminated against and should be assessed at lower rates than 0.25 percent. But state studies had supported the county’s rate for years, and as a result even when tax firms appealed their cases in court most hearing officers sided with the county on the issue.

Maidenbaum argued in court that several of his clients were assessed at a higher rate than other properties using his own expert in 2006, but the case failed when his expert’s analysis was rejected in state Supreme Court. He tried again four years later, and that lawsuit was resolved when Mangano took the reform team’s recommendations, hiring an outside contractor to set up his Tax Grievance Negotiation and Settlement Program. Through the program, officials have agreed to lower assessment rates each year and use them in resolving all appeals, including those not filed with the help of a firm.

Assessment Review Commission Chairwoman Robin Laveman said under the old system, rates were debated constantly and resulted in uneven results.

“That process was a disaster,” she said.

One reason the county refused before this to negotiate a lower rate for all those who appealed was that it would have led to an enormous number of properties obtaining a reduction, leaving those that had not filed a grievance over-assessed. That’s exactly what has happened.

The freeze resulted in the assessments of unappealed properties being stuck at the assessments in place when the freeze began in 2012, while those who successfully appealed were assessed at the lower, negotiated rates. The most recent tax bills were affected by a 0.17 percent rate, which is 32 percent lower than 0.25 percent.

But, in contrast to the public record of the most mundane decision of the County Legislature, exactly how the negotiation of lower assessment rates used by the commission occurs remains a bit of a mystery, despite the enormous effect they have on the distribution of the tax burden. County officials have not disclosed what all the rates are, who specifically negotiates them or how the determinations are arrived at. In response to a request under the state’s public records law for any records relating to the negotiation or setting of the rates, the officials said that no such records exist.

County Attorney Carnell Foskey then recently said in an emailed statement that records do exist, but they will not be disclosed.

“The analysis and conclusions of these studies and this information are part of the attorney client work process,” he said, adding that neither side of the negotiations wants the strengths or weaknesses of their analyses exposed.

Ultimately, Newsday determined what the rates were by reviewing court cases and interviewing various small tax-appeal firm attorneys, who sometimes learn what the rates are only when the county settles their cases.

In a striking reversal of past practice, of the 858,647 claims filed since the settlement program began, 78.1 percent of them resulted in a reduction, almost all awarded without court hearings.

This has been a boon for the tax firms. They have won 526,695 claims in the past five years, compared with 292,062 claims they won in the five years before the program began.

Firms mainly handling residential claims, like Maidenbaum’s and Orsini’s, charge their clients from 40 percent to 50 percent of the first year of tax savings they obtain from a reduction, while firms primarily handling commercial property claims charge between 15 percent and 33 percent.

Using the average of those rates — 45 percent for residential firms and 24 percent for commercial firms — Newsday conservatively estimates the firms will make $502 million for appeals filed in the first six years of the program, and that this is about $167 million more than they would have made without it, assuming they did not go out of business.

Aside from the extra revenue, the firms also saw a sharp drop in their costs. Unlike appeals resolved by the commission, which often settles them without ever meeting face-to-face with challengers, court cases require taxpayers or their representatives to appear before a hearing officer, which makes them more costly. The number of court cases filed dropped from 313,980 in the five years before the overhaul to 132,183 in the past five.

Sternberg, of the Maidenbaum firms, said the drop in court hearings hasn’t just benefited tax firms, but also “the county, the courts, as well as the taxpayers themselves who no longer need to wait to get their money back.”

Mangano signed an executive order enacting his other major initiative — the assessment freeze — even before the residential and commercial reform team members had finished their reports.

It hardly mattered. Only the residential members were cautionary about a freeze, warning in their report that without one critical provision such a measure could be unconstitutional or lead to inequity. That provision was enormously beneficial to the tax firms: The team insisted that appeals be allowed to continue during the freeze. Mangano agreed.

The freeze locked in the reductions property owners achieved, allowing them to benefit each subsequent year. The now-$1.7 billion tax shift grew by $405 million last year, and continues to surge as the freeze stretches on.

Mangano advocated a two-year freeze during his 2009 campaign, but that turned into a four-year one in his executive order. Because of delays attributed to the massive damage caused by superstorm Sandy, it is now projected to last seven.

Implementing the plan

With the freeze in place and assessment challenges being resolved before they went to court, Mangano eliminated dozens of employees who were involved in the old process of deeply reviewing all challenges.

Nearly a third of the workforce of the Assessment Department, Assessment Review Commission and the County Attorney’s Office had been laid off by Mangano’s second year in office.

County officials brought in Standard Valuation Services, a longtime county appraisal contractor, to set up and run the settlement program in its first year. The firm is owned by Matthew L. Smith, and he, his employees and their family members as well as other firms Smith operates have contributed at least $542,700 to political candidates since 2006, including at least $339,700 to Republican committees, according to state campaign finance records. They contributed at least $133,400 to Mangano’s campaign committee and only $22,500 to Suozzi’s.

Smith said his firm has done business with the county for 20 years under multiple administrations, and his political contributions are often tied to golf outings and other events he and his employees attend as a gesture to those he does business with, both Democrats and Republicans. He said he also contributed to Suozzi, whom he has known for decades, before 2006 when the state began keeping local officials’ campaign finance records.

“The reason I get these contracts — and I’ve worked with Nassau County from the 1990s and my family has worked with Nassau County since the 1960s — is because we can do the job and we have the expertise,” Smith said, adding that his firm is the largest on Long Island. “To me, I don’t consider us as political.”

Smith’s firm was hired without competitive bidding and without a contract being approved by the county legislature, even though county law requires each. The county legislature approved the $2.4 million contract in July 2011, seven months after Smith’s firm began the work.

“It’s unacceptably late,” the legislature’s presiding officer, Peter Schmitt (R-Massapequa), was quoted as saying at the time. “We’ve been put in a corner with this contract and I don’t like it.”

Then-County Attorney John Ciampoli said at the time the county needed to move fast in order to settle claims and that Smith’s company was the only one capable of doing the work. He said the work was exempt from legislative oversight because Smith was serving as an expert witness in court appeals, including the case filed by Maidenbaum’s firm.

Smith said settling the 60,000 cases he worked on in that first year of the program required his staff to work seven days a week in order to meet the county’s deadline for resolving them. He said his firm was not involved with the negotiation of rates.

“This was a nutty time,” Smith said. “We really worked around the clock.”

Acting assessor appointed

To run the smaller assessment department, Mangano did not name the sort of credentialed assessor voters supported in the 2008 referendum that ended the practice of electing a county assessor, but fellow Republican James Davis. He had considered a run for assessor before the referendum, but didn’t muster enough support, according to a Newsday report at the time. There were questions about how long Jankowski, the Suozzi appointee, would last in the new administration and they were answered when he was fired after failing to catch an error made years before he was appointed that resulted in the county legislative building being taxed — a $1.3 million gaffe.

As a result of the referendum, the county charter requires an appointed assessor to have a degree from a two-year college and two years of full-time appraisal experience or a degree from a four-year college and one year of full-time appraisal experience. It also requires the assessor to be certified by the International Association of Assessing Officers, the main professional society, in one of five fields and to obtain state certification, which has similar minimum requirements.

Mangano got around these requirements by naming Davis “acting assessor,” which did not require legislative approval. Had he been appointed, his term would have been for three years. He has now served for six years.

Davis had worked in the Assessment Department for 23 years when he was named to the position. He held the title of Deputy Assessor, but the position did not entail appraising property, according to Jankowski and the last elected assessor, Harvey Levinson. His employment applications, which Newsday obtained from the Nassau County Civil Service Commission, show he took accounting classes at Nassau County Community College in the 1990s, but had not continued them or graduated as of 2004. The International Association of Assessing Officers said it has no record of him being a member.

Referring to a lawsuit brought by commercial property owners, Davis said in a statement emailed Jan. 24 that he could not comment on his qualifications at this time.

“However,” he said, “it is important to note that I have 23 years of experience working in the assessment office, including the exemptions unit, field unit and administrative office.”

County spokesman Brian Nevin said in an earlier emailed statement that the County Charter’s qualifications fail to recognize Davis’ many years of Nassau government experience, and that he was named to the position after a nationwide search.

“Under Mr. Davis’s leadership in the department,” Nevin said, “Nassau has successfully implemented assessment reforms which have saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars while addressing systematic problems that have plagued County finances for decades.”

Labor dispute settlement

Eliminating a third of the county assessment staff triggered one of two employment disputes resulting from Mangano’s reforms. The assessment workers’ union accused the administration of privatizing work the contract defined as theirs.

The full details of the labor dispute’s settlement, which did not occur until June 2016, are confidential, but the deal included a $381,579 settlement, according to the resolution approving it. Union president Jerry Laricchiuta did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The other faceoff resulted in a county loss in court and what appears to be a payout of at least $295,000 after Mangano prematurely ended the terms of the entire board of the Assessment Review Commission.

One month before Mangano took office, Suozzi appointed five Democrats to fill two vacancies and replace two Democrats and a commissioner not registered with a political party. He also reappointed a commissioner for whom no voter registration could be found. Mangano fired them all, and two Republicans and an Independence Party member, as well, in order to bring in his team.

Three of the dismissed commissioners sued and the state’s top court, the Court of Appeals, eventually ruled they should be reinstated, but the county refused. The matter was settled for undisclosed terms in July 2014, but Newsday tracked down county records of three payments made to the dismissed commissioners totaling $295,500.

According to the commission’s website, the panel now consists of five members, including two members of the Nassau County Republican Party Committee, two more Republicans and the chairwoman, Laveman, an Independence Party member married to a longtime Republican donor.

“I am personally registered to vote as an Independent,” Laveman said in an emailed statement. “Anyone who knows me (and even my relationship to my husband) would know and understand the [importance] of this independence to me—both political and otherwise.”

According to state law, the commission should have nine members with no more than six registered in the same political party.

One reason Mangano gave for the dismissals was the high cost of the prior commissioners’ salaries. Three full-time commissioners made up to $130,000 a year while a stipend of $20,000 was given to the other six part-timers. Laveman was paid $100,000 in 2015 for full-time work running the department, while the other commissioners were paid $15,000.

“Politics plays no role here,” Laveman said, adding that the commission “functions perfectly fine despite vacancies which have saved taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.”

Dolores Sedacca, one of the Democratic commissioners who sued after being dismissed by Mangano, said she would never have supported the settlement program, which she said amounted to handing out tax breaks to obtain votes for re-election.

“I would be completely against everything that was going on,” Sedacca said.

The future of assessments

Mangano was re-elected in 2013 by a far larger margin than in his first campaign. He defeated Suozzi again by 49,315 votes, compared with his 386-vote margin four years earlier.

All the while, the county executive has promoted the $20 million to $30 million annual savings from the settlement program. This, he said, is the most consequential result of his program.

Newsday estimates the reforms have cut costs through the end of this year by between $115 million and $299 million, depending upon whether factors like inflation and the effects of a new commercial tax program are included. The $115 million is less than the $167 million in additional income Newsday conservatively estimates the tax firms have earned in fees from taxpayers since the reforms began.

Newsday’s estimates break down to between $14 million and $37 million per year — more than Mangano estimated on the high end and less than he estimated on the low end.

One reason the savings haven’t been greater is that tax firms handling commercial appeals, which account for just 10 percent of grievances but 70 percent of refunds, have continued to appeal their cases in court, just as they did during the Suozzi years.

By implementing the commercial tax program, the county could significantly reduce its refund burden by essentially charging the cost of commercial property refunds to all commercial property owners. It is also moving forward with its first update of assessments for changes in real estate market values since the freeze began. The initiative will set assessments at their full market value and do away with rates altogether, something numerous critics have pushed for decades. But it requires state legislation.

The project will cover thousands of properties as it updates data for new assessments. It is expected to be complete in time for late 2019 and early 2020 tax bills.

The cost of the contract was significant at $3.8 million, and it emerged at a time when pay-to-play politics was shaking the county after the indictment of then-State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) on allegations he pressured the county to award a contract to a firm paying his son.

The county had attracted two bids for the reassessment work, one of them from Smith, who was awarded the contract even though his bid was $2 million higher than that of his competitor, Michael Haberman Associates. Newsday tied Haberman’s firm to at least $93,000 in political contributions, three-quarters of it to Democratic committees. Smith said the disparity came because his submission covered a scope of work that exceeded his competitor’s, an assertion backed up in bid documents.

Nonetheless, the contract was pulled at the last minute off a May 2015 county legislature agenda and the contract was eventually split between Smith and Haberman. Smith said it would have been better to award the contract to one firm, instead of having two firms working separately on the project.

Mangano said Smith’s firm has been awarded numerous contracts under prior administrations and that he is not involved in county bidding processes at all.

“The county executive does not take part in that,” he said. “Period.”

With Celeste Hadrick and Daniel Wheaton

Design: Matthew Cassella Chart: Tim Healy Production: Saba Ali

The sweeping tax overhaul Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano began after his election seven years ago has in effect created two different property assessment systems — separate and unequal — and a startling shift in tax burden revealed for the first time through an 18-month Newsday investigation.

One system covers the 61 percent of the county’s residential and commercial property owners who appealed their assessments in this period. The typical tax bill for them has gone up only $466, or 5 percent over the last seven years, with virtually four out of every five appeals successful.

The other covers the 39 percent who haven’t appealed. The typical tax bill for these owners has gone up seven times as much — by $2,748, or 35.7 percent.

These findings are documented in a series of data studies by Newsday that provide one of the most comprehensive analyses of the county’s assessment system ever undertaken. They expose hidden hardships among senior citizens and less affluent residents less likely to appeal and reflect dramatic changes in the countywide distribution of taxes between the highest-valued properties and all others.

The analyses established a shift of at least $1.7 billion in taxes over seven years from those who successfully appealed their assessments to those who haven’t and found that just 10 percent of the victorious properties — those worth $1 million or more before their reassessments — garnered nearly half the benefit. More than $790 million in taxes that would have been paid on these properties was transferred, overwhelmingly to lower-valued parcels, while owners of thousands of the appealed million-dollar homes and office buildings actually pay less in taxes today than they did seven years ago.

The overhaul largely reversed years of effort by the county before Mangano’s election to more equitably distribute the tax burden following a 1997 lawsuit that alleged minority homeowners were being hit with disproportionately high bills. Operating under a 2000 court-supervised settlement requiring high levels of assessment accuracy, officials increased the share of taxes paid by more expensive properties and decreased the share of less expensive ones, regardless of whether their owners were from minority groups or not.

That put the county’s residential assessments into compliance with virtually all of the most widely used professional standards for fairness and accuracy. A Newsday residential property data study conducted with the assistance of two national assessment experts found that it is now out of compliance with all of them.

County officials did not question the results of Newsday’s analyses in responding to inquiries for this story. Mangano defended his reforms as a way to reduce the county’s assessment-system costs and prevent them from ballooning the county’s debt burden. The reforms saved the county $20 to $30 million a year, he estimated.

“Every single taxpayer has benefitted and every future generation as well by not creating that debt,” he said.

In response to evidence that less affluent homeowners filed fewer grievances, county officials said they hold more than 40 workshops a year to explain how to challenge assessments and produced a video describing the process of filing online, which only Nassau County allows.

Robin Laveman, the head of the county’s grievance arbiter, the Assessment Review Commission, said Mangano’s reforms replaced a system that was “a disaster” that caused Nassau to pay massive property tax refunds.

Mangano’s unexpected election was fueled by anger over the tax bills that increased during the years before his victory and his vow to take on a system that, beyond issues of fairness, was under assault by waves of successful assessment challenges that were straining the county budget. Those grievances resulted in enormous refunds Nassau had to pay for taxes billed by nearly 300 towns, school districts and other authorities that relied on county assessments that were reduced by appeals.

The aggressive solution he implemented has saved the county between $115 million and $299 million, depending upon various factors estimated by Newsday, including inflation and the effect of a recently launched program for commercial property refunds. But the savings came at the price of the growing disparities, which were widely predicted as they were being implemented.

The solution involved, first, awarding deeply discounted reductions on far more appealed properties than ever in an effort to save money by settling cases before tax refunds had to be paid and, second, an assessment freeze that locked in those reductions from year to year. Over a six-year period in which most property values increased, 78 percent of the 858,000 grievances filed have resulted in reductions, often in double digits.

Historically around the country, more affluent property owners file appeals with greater frequency than others — something critics had warned of — and the results have been telling in Nassau, where the steepness of the reductions owners could obtain was never fully explained publicly or promoted by the county.

The effects are apparent in all three of the county property classes included in the results of Newsday’s analyses, which excluded a fourth class composed of telephone poles and other utility properties.

In the residential class, which includes private homes and low-rise condo buildings, the gap between appealed and unappealed properties was even larger than among all properties — the median tax bills of appealed properties rose $431 or 5 percent while those of unappealed properties rose $2,738 or 36 percent. The median bills are those of typical property owners, both commercial and residential, whose burden falls halfway between the largest and smallest bills. This article refers to the median bills as the “typical” ones.

In the category that includes cooperatives and high-rise condo buildings, bills for the typical appealed property increased $202 or 4 percent compared to $2,299 or 60 percent for unappealed property. In the final category, covering commercial properties, the gap between the two groups was $588, but that number does not include refunds many of the properties receive after often multiyear court battles.

Those one-year disparities add up over six years. The typical unappealed property tax bill increases exceeded those of appealed properties by $8,959 over that period.

Sometimes the disparities are evident side by side in virtually identical houses. Scott Manes, 62, and Rick Cafiero, 65, own two similar homes right next to each other in Syosset. The bill on Manes’ house is now $88 lower than it was seven years ago after he appealed, while Cafiero’s bill increased $4,327 after he did not appeal.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Manes said of the system. “There shouldn’t be that large a disparity.”

Tax bills are smaller for a quarter of Nassau properties than they were seven years ago after appealing. Among them are nearly 11,000 valued by the county at $1 million or more before their assessments were reduced, including nearly 8,700 single-family homes.

At the other extreme are 93,560 unappealed properties with increases topping $2,400, including more than 6,400 owned by senior citizens and the disabled with a variety of property tax exemptions.

Altogether, the successful appeals have led to 670,456 reductions and more than $37 billion in county-estimated market value being cut from the tax rolls. This has forced governments to tax the remaining value at a higher tax rate to maintain their budgets.

As those rates increased, the tax bills of those who did not appeal and did not get a reduction jumped far more than those who did. The shift in the first year totaled $137 million. The cumulative total had grown to $346 million the next year, and reached $1.7 billion this year.

Newsday reached this estimate by calculating what the average tax rate of properties would have been had they not appealed and multiplying it by what their assessments were before their successful grievances. The amount they ended up paying was subtracted from the estimate of what they would have paid.

In minority communities, which were at the center of the court settlement, the tax burden has come full circle, according to one Newsday study of residential properties that used census tract data. It found that homes in those communities were assessed at a level 12 percent higher for the tax year that just ended. That compares to 11.7 percent in the year before the court settlement first affected assessments. The difference had fallen to 7.1 percent in the year before Mangano’s reforms.

Every property owner has a constitutional right to appeal their taxes if they believe they are incorrectly assessed.

– Edward Mangano, Nassau County executive

Paul Henry, who has operated a small tax firm out of Suffolk County for 25 years and was instrumental in the filing of the racial discrimination lawsuit, said the disparities in Nassau’s assessments are usually seen in systems that have not been reassessed for decades, like many others on Long Island.

“There is a very big difference,” he concluded, “in naturally deteriorating tax rolls due to lack of maintenance as opposed to developing active policy which results in the ripping apart of the tax roll.”

Mangano has defended his reforms as successes that streamlined an out-of-control system. He said, “every property owner has a constitutional right to appeal their taxes if they believe they are incorrectly assessed.”

He expressed regret for how long it has taken to end the assessment freeze, which he suggested during his 2009 campaign would last two years but which he announced after taking office would last four. It is now scheduled to end after seven years, a delay blamed on county workers’ time being consumed by superstorm Sandy assessment issues.

The county executive has set in motion two other long-range programs that involve sweeping changes of their own and could affect some taxpayers adversely, raising the prospects of opposition. One proposal would shift the burden of commercial property tax refunds onto all business owners, even if they did not appeal. The other, a reassessment of all county property at full market value, could greatly increase the bills of those who appealed over the past six years, in particular.

But for now, the likely outcome is a tax shift that continues to grow.

Homeowners interviewed by Newsday who did not appeal said the higher taxes are pushing them from their homes and businesses and forcing cutbacks on everything from home repairs to vacations. Senior citizens on fixed incomes say they are particularly squeezed, and those who look into selling learn their properties are worth less due to the tax increases. Almost none of them had any idea why their taxes had surged.

It’s kind of appalling that you would have the county government taking advantage of people this way.

– Joseph Cardali, Babylon resident

Joseph Cardali, 54, lives in Babylon and cares for his 79-year-old mother, Helen Cardali, in Levittown, where the median tax bill of those filing grievances increased 0.6 percent, or $62. Mrs. Cardali pays $3,996 a year more in property taxes than she did in 2010-11, a 66 percent increase.

“Because my mother lives here and she is quiet and unassuming, you are going to take advantage of that?” he asked after describing his mother as the kind of person to trust her tax bills.

Cardali said his mother has not taken vacations in years and is house poor, with the biggest expense from her fixed income being her $10,089 tax bills.

“It’s kind of appalling that you would have the county government taking advantage of people this way,” he said. “There’s got to be a tremendous number of people who are in my mother’s situation who don’t know.”

I don’t feel like I’m getting anything back for staying all these years and taking care of the home and paying the school taxes.

– Jane Esopa, Freeport resident

Jane Esopa, 74, lives in Freeport, one of the communities that were the focus of the racial discrimination lawsuit. Under the more recent reforms, her home’s taxes have risen $4,884, or 75 percent, in five years. Before his death this year, her husband went back to work mowing lawns at 79 while suffering from esophageal cancer to help pay the steep increases.

She fears the loss of her home and continues to work in a medical office, as she has for 20 years, frustrated over a bill that grows and grows. “I don’t feel like I’m getting anything back for staying all these years and taking care of the home and paying the school taxes,” said Esopa, who said she did not file a grievance because she believed she needed to hire a tax appeal firm and did not want to pay the fee.

It’s hard to imagine a more convoluted property tax system than the one in Nassau County, which according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates has the largest average home tax bills of any county in the country. Not only are properties divided into four classes, but each is assessed at a minute fraction of full market value. For instance, residential properties have a rate of 0.25 percent, which assesses a $400,000 home at $1,000. Each class is also billed at a different rate by the nearly 300 taxing authorities using county assessments.

As recently as 15 years ago, assessments had been based on what it cost to build a home in 1938 and land values from 1964. The system ignored the impact a location might have on a home’s value, whether it be on the water or abutting a train track. It also turned a blind eye to the fact that more expensive homes had increased in value faster than others over the decades.

A judicial challenge came in 1997. The late Roosevelt community activist Diana Coleman and four other homeowners represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union brought a suit accusing the county of violating federal civil rights and fair housing laws by systematically under-assessing higher-valued properties, causing poorer, minority homeowners to overpay for government services.

The plaintiffs won the support of the New York Attorney-General’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice, which conducted a study that found homes in minority communities were assessed at a level 27 percent higher than others for the 1997-98 tax year.

After failing to get the suit dismissed, the county settled and agreed to update its assessment practices and meet industry standards for fairness not only for private homes but for all classes of property.

Before the 2003-04 tax year lawsuit reassessment, the properties of some predominantly minority school districts were overassessed an average of 27 percent, a figure that dropped dramatically to 5 percent or less after the reassessment, according to a study conducted by the county’s reassessment contractor.

But not everyone was happy. To maintain fairness, officials began updating assessments to reflect changes in the real estate market, which was surging at the time. And those assessment increases came on top of tax increases totaling 22 percent pushed through by then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi, who confronted pressing financial issues when he took office.

Unsurprisingly, the substantial hikes were met with ire. The county’s residential tax appeal industry — perhaps the most robust and aggressive in the country — became an outlet. Even though the more accurate assessments the county worked to implement for the 2003-04 tax year were expected to be challenged less, appeals doubled from that point in only two years, from 56,755 to 125,731, with the firms collecting up to half the first year’s savings as a fee when their clients won.

Ensuring that those firms didn’t obtain any unwarranted reductions was an enormously costly endeavor with a lot at stake because of the state law known as the county guaranty. That requires Nassau uniquely to refund not only the taxes it owes property owners who win appeals after they pay their bills, but also to refund the taxes owed by school districts and other taxing authorities that based their taxes on the county’s overturned assessments.

The most recent audited data available from the county estimates it owes $302.6 million for pending appeals and $939 million in unpaid bond debt for past refunds, shackling future generations with the payments.

Mangano’s freeze

Mangano beat Suozzi in 2009 by just 386 votes. A few months later, he ordered the freeze, which Republicans had been pushing for years citing “assessment fatigue” over adjustments made to assessments each year to keep them accurate.

Effective with the school bills of 2012, it halted any change in assessment unless a taxpayer filed a challenge or a property was damaged or renovated. It ended the county’s practice of updating assessments annually for changes in the real estate market, which had been keeping them accurate.

Attempting to resolve challenges before tax bills went out was more complicated. Here, Mangano relied on a proposal that tax appeal firms had been advocating, which the county had fiercely opposed. Instead of having tens of thousands of challenges wend through the system in painstaking fashion, the county would negotiate rates of assessment low enough to induce the tax firms to quickly settle their cases. The rates would be even smaller than the 0.25 percent used for residential properties.

Settling grievances by establishing assessments at those smaller fractions would leave properties with even less of their value taxed. Meanwhile, unappealed properties would remain assessed and taxed at higher fractions, which are referred to in county notices as “levels of assessment.”

Given the number of grievances filed each year the plan ran the risk of creating mass inequities between appealed and unappealed properties, which is why the county had steadfastly opposed the concept. An assessment freeze would lock in the disparities because it carried forward the lower rates used for the appealed properties and the higher rates used for unappealed properties.

Officials have negotiated lower assessment rates with tax firms each year and have used them to settle all claims, even those not filed by the firms. The rates are now so low a $1 million home reduced on appeal for the current tax year was assessed the same as an unappealed home whose county appraisal has been frozen at $680,000 since 2012. Both would also receive the same tax bill if they were in the same school district and shared other similarities.

… in very simple terms, seniors and poorer areas complain less and therefore will end up being over-assessed. 

– Lee Kyriacou, former head of the state’s Office of Real Property Tax Services

Because appeals are unsuccessful only when a property is already severely under-assessed, fully 78 percent of them have been granted reductions, including 27,431 properties reduced six years in a row.

Complain less, pay more

While some experts said the proposed reforms could have benefits in limited circumstances, criticisms and caution flags emerged early and often that the reforms would disproportionately benefit higher value properties. Newsday’s statistical study confirms they were prophetic.

The former head of the state’s Office of Real Property Tax Services, Lee Kyriacou, who criticized the idea of an assessment freeze as “highly imprudent if not illegal” when it was first proposed in 2007, said a study his office completed found low-income property owners were most likely to be negatively affected by assessment-challenge tax shifts.

“We were able to use that analysis to say in very simple terms, seniors and poorer areas complain less and therefore will end up being over-assessed,” he said. “Unless you do comprehensive reassessment every so often, it is a statistical certainty.”

A lot of people just don’t believe it can help them. 

– Paul Henry

County Comptroller George Maragos’ office warned in the first year of the overhaul that the tax burden was shifting back toward middle-class and poorer homes. A 2012 Newsday analysis offered striking figures about the disparities in appeals rates between rich and working-class communities. In North Hills and Port Washington North, 75 percent of property owners challenged. But in East Atlantic Beach, Roosevelt, Uniondale and Glen Cove, the rate only reached 15 percent.

A common reason owners gave Newsday for not appealing was a belief that their properties were already under-assessed, and, in fact, before the freeze county officials had valued properties somewhat below what they were worth to dissuade owners from appealing. But what the owners didn’t realize was that appealed properties are assessed even lower than theirs and that they missed out on the bargain.

Others property owners told Newsday they thought tax firms were scams, didn’t feel qualified to file an appeal on their own or had just put off filing into the future. Henry said his experience has shown him property owners don’t protest due to a lack of knowledge. For instance, some wrongly believe a protest can lead to an increase in their assessments, as can happen in many states other than New York.

“Some people have fear, but a lot of people may just have a lack of knowledge,” Henry said. “A lot of people just don’t believe it can help them.”

County officials have held more education sessions to help homeowners file appeals, but the sessions routinely omit explanations of why it is so advantageous to challenge — that the negotiated assessment rates almost guarantee a reduction. The county’s website contains a recently added video tutorial on how to file an appeal, but the site also contains outdated information. Its online appeal-filing system, which attempts to help applicants value their home, does not account for the lower-negotiated rates and as a result it usually wrongly tells them they won’t receive a reduction if they file their appeal.

This sent first-time homebuyer Danny Liang, 31, who lives in East Meadow and works as a computer programmer, on a weekslong mission to determine why the home he bought had dramatically higher tax bills than his neighbors, even though the county estimated it was worth less than he paid for it. He started going to county grievance sessions after the online system told him he wouldn’t receive a reduction. He said it did not help.

“I was told over and over again, ‘use the software and if it said you should not challenge, then you should not challenge,’” Liang said.

He finally did challenge after attending a workshop held by a former Assessment Review Commission member, Jeff Gold, but it won’t affect his tax bills for another year.

Hans Thomann, 62, said a major reason his 85-year-old mother, Gerda, reluctantly sold her Syosset home last December after the death of her husband was the 40 percent, $5,169 increase in her property tax bills since 2011.

Thomann, who lives in New Jersey, said the property tax system “shouldn’t be dependent on the savvy of the individual person or having their own faculties or children who can do this for them, to challenge their assessment. It should be done in an equitable way for all.”

It wasn’t until five years after the start of the program that the Thomann family filed an appeal on their property, saving $1,000 on their school tax bill just before selling.

‘Ratio study’ results

To measure the effects Mangano’s reforms had on assessment fairness and tax bills, Newsday embarked on a series of data analyses. Most critical was a statistical “ratio study” that analyzed residential properties, which account for 91 percent of the county’s properties and pay nearly 75 percent of the tax burden. A ratio study is a standard tool used by assessors to judge the fairness and accuracy of their assessments by comparing them to the sales prices of recently sold homes.

In developing the study, Newsday consulted Robert Gloudemans, who has directed or participated in more than 100 assessment projects for government agencies around the world, and Alan Dornfest, the tax policy research supervisor of Idaho State Tax Commission, who has 45 years of experience in the field. Both experts have helped develop some of the standards assessors use to judge the accuracy of their work. They reviewed the study after it was completed to identify any deviations from accepted professional standards. None were found.

Gloudemans, who also served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Coleman case, concluded the study was on “solid ground.”

“Your conclusions are supported by the statistical results,” he said.

Newsday’s study compared the assessments of 42,792 homes sold in various tax years to their sales prices. Using statistical tests accepted as industry standards, Newsday also compared results for non-appealed homes against those that appealed, successfully or not. It also compared homes in predominantly minority communities identified using U.S. Census Bureau data to those sold elsewhere. Following industry standards, the results are accurate at a confidence level of 95 percent or better.

The most extreme disparity the study found was between homes in minority areas that had not filed an assessment challenge and those elsewhere that had, an important figure as homes in minority areas were 30 percent less likely to file an appeal. The unappealed minority area homes were assessed at a level 27.2 percent higher than appealed properties elsewhere, the study’s median assessment level results show. That figure is about the same as the 27 percent disparity experienced on average by minority property owners in 1997-98, according to the Justice Department’s study of that tax year for the discrimination lawsuit.

The consequences of not appealing, the study determined, had a broad effect that reached into the county’s middle class irrespective of race. Across the entire county, typical homeowners who have not appealed are assessed at a level 18.4 percent higher than those who have, the study found.

To measure how those assessment trends have affected property owners in dollars and cents, Newsday examined how tax bills have changed for those who appealed, including those who were unsuccessful, and those who did not.

The most compelling comparisons emerge at the individual school district level. Nassau’s 55 districts account for an average of nearly 70 percent of property owners’ tax bills, but their rates often vary considerably. Thus, the owners in a single district are more likely to face parallel tax pressures, and the disparities of the appeals process become evident in close to an apples-to-apples way.

In the East Williston School District, the median tax bills among the 2,201 taxpayers who appealed went up $131 from the 2010-11 tax year to 2016-17. That amounted to a 0.8 percent increase over seven years. For the 778 taxpayers who did not appeals, the increase was $4,461 or 36.1 percent.

In Jericho, the increase for the 3,794 who appealed was $3,800 or 26 percent, but the median bills of the 1,028 who didn’t appeal increased $6,333 or 51.3 percent.

In Syosset, the increase was $2,033 for the 8,439 who appealed, marking a 14.5 percent tax jump. For the 2,555 who didn’t appeal, the increase was $5,921 or 51.4 percent.

The disparity grows when the results are parsed further to account for the disproportionate shift of benefit to wealthier properties. In the Hewlett-Woodmere district, for example, a straight-up comparison of those who appealed to those who didn’t appeal reveals a dramatic shift — those who appealed saw a median tax bill increase of only $468, or 3.3 percent, while those who didn’t absorbed an increase of $3,993, or 40.2 percent.

But tax bills actually dropped over the first five years of the overhaul for owners of the most valuable 10 percent of Hewlett-Woodmere properties that were appealed, those worth $1 million or more, according to their county appraisal at the start of Mangano’s program. Their median tax bills went down $2,289 after appealing, leaving a gap between them and all those who didn’t appeal of more than $5,000.

In Bellmore, the median bills of owners who appealed among the most-expensive 10 percent of homes went down $2,455, while less valuable properties not appealing went up $3,096. In Lynbrook, bills of the top 10 percent dropped $1,121, while bills of less valuable properties not appealing went up $3,385.

Among the five cities and towns in Nassau County, similar dichotomies emerged. Typical property owners filing a grievance in Glen Cove, which does not bill for school services through the county assessment system, saw small decreases in their tax bills, compared to a $208 increase for those who didn’t appeal. In Oyster Bay, the median tax bill of those who appealed went up $880, while the bills of those who did not appeal went up $3,379.

Eighty-two percent of the properties appraised at $1.4 million or more in North Hempstead before the overhaul began (the top 10 percent) filed an appeal, with the median bills of that group going up just $788, compared to a $3,058 increase for less-valuable properties not appealing.

Out of compliance

Many states, including New York, have adopted the fairness and accuracy standards set by the assessment professions’ core education and research society, the International Association of Assessing officers. Newsday’s ratio study shows the county’s assessments have come out of compliance with all of them.

Among the association’s guidelines is one rule stipulating that in the aggregate an assessors’ appraisals must come within 10 percent of what properties are worth. The median Nassau County property was appraised at 90.8 percent of its value in the year before Mangano’s reforms. That fell to 69.1 percent in 2016-17, according to Newsday’s study.

The association also has developed a standard for the average assessment error rate, a yardstick known as the Coefficient of Dispersion that measures how frequently and by how much individual assessments are inaccurate. The figure should not exceed 15 percent for a system like Nassau’s.

The county guaranty has been the biggest impediment to eliminating a wasteful and unfair system.

– Acting Assessor James Davis

According to Newsday’s study, Nassau’s error rate was 7.6 percent in 2010-11, but more than doubled to 15.3 percent by 2016-17, exceeding the standard with two more years of the freeze to go.

Finally, there are standards on whether higher-valued properties are being under-assessed in comparison to lower-valued properties. If they are, then lower-valued properties would be overtaxed, making the system regressive — something that would be expected under Mangano’s reforms given how higher-valued properties were more likely to appeal.

Nassau has come out of compliance with the two most widely used standards for regressivity. The most modern measure recommends assessment levels stay within 5 percent of each other even as property values double. In 2010-11, Nassau’s levels shrank by 3.5 percent as values doubled on average, but by 2016-17 they had fallen outside the standard, with the rate of shrinkage shooting to 6.5 percent, nearly twice what it used to be.

Newsday’s study was also shared with other experts, the heads of tax firms and county officials. Thomas Hamilton, the Gerald Fogelson Distinguished Chair of Real Estate at Roosevelt University in Chicago, said the findings drew coherent conclusions “based on reasonable acceptable methods.”

Acting Assessor James Davis said the true measure of an assessment system’s accuracy is how much it generates in property tax refunds.

“Had the program not been implemented,” Davis said, “the burden to repay property tax refunds would have been ‘shifted’ to all residential and commercial taxpayers alike by virtue of the county guaranty. The county guaranty has been the biggest impediment to eliminating a wasteful and unfair system.”

Reforms in question

Several additional Mangano reforms that could stabilize the tax system are in the early stages of being implemented. Their future is in question given the uncertainty of whether he will run for re-election in the wake of his federal corruption indictment, which is unrelated to his tax policy, and talk of legal challenges.

“Will the assessment system be improved? Absolutely,” Davis said. “The goal of the administration and the Department of Assessment has been and will always be to establish values on properties that are defendable and, most importantly, fair and equitable for all property owners.”

Meanwhile, seven years in, the price of his reforms continues, unevenly distributed, and often paid most by those least able to afford it.

Freeport homeowner Mathilde Brathwaite, 79, who is black, remembers when the county settled the Coleman lawsuit. A retired bank employee, she listened from the doorway of her one-story Cape Cod in a middle-class portion of the village as she learned about the overhaul for the first time. A window by the door was broken. Other things needed to be fixed first, she said.

“We had to cut back terrible,” Brathwaite says of how her family has paid the tax bill, which increased $3,530, or 42 percent, in seven years.

You feel that instead of them being out there to help you, they are out there to get you

– Shant Boudakian, Syosset resident

Brathwaite said she and her husband were told by county officials years ago their assessment couldn’t be reduced because of the large size of their backyard and believed that was still the case today. They finally decided to file a challenge at the start of 2016, but it won’t reduce their bills until October 2017.

“When we tell people how much we pay in taxes they just can’t get over it,” Brathwaite said. “They really can’t get over it.”

In more affluent communities, the effect has been experienced, as well. Shant Boudakian, 53, who moved from Atlanta back home to Syosset in 2014 to care for his 97-year-old father, said he was jolted by the tax bill on the 1,800-square-foot house — $16,309, a $4,707, or 41 percent, increase since 2011-12.

Boudakian said his father would not be able to carry the increase without investments that supplement his pension. He said he would file a grievance for him next year.

“You feel that instead of them being out there to help you, they are out there to get you,” Boudakian said. “And that shouldn’t be that way.”

CORRECTION: Newsday computed how much property owners saved by successfully appealing their assessments since Nassau County’s tax system overhaul began by subtracting the aggregate amount of taxes they paid from an estimate of the amount they would have paid had they not appealed. A description transposed the two categories in a previous version of this story.

Design: James Stewart, Matthew Cassella Production: Tara Conry