After years of multiple litigations, the Town of Greenburgh settled the lawsuit brought by S&R Development. This particular claim filed in 2016, arose from zoning map changes made by the Town in 2007, which prevented S&R from constructing an apartment building at Central Ave by Dromore Road. The litigation is long, convoluted, and the facts are disputed. I'm not going to assign blame. I'm interested in the costs to taxpayers. Under the settlement, the Town is to pay S&R $9,500,000. Of this amount, insurance will cover $2,750,000, leaving taxpayers to cover the remaining $6,750,000. In addition, it is reported that the town spent over $4million in legal fees to date. Because this is a zoning matter, only unincorporated residents are responsible for forking over these funds; you villagers can relax and laugh at the TOV suckers.
Some of you may remember the last big Town Board blunder that residents had to cover and that we are still paying for: the Fortress Bible settlement in Dec. 2013. Then, the Fortress Bible Church claimed that the Town's actions prevented it from building on land the church purchased. The church sued the Town and received a settlement of $6,500,000. Insurance only covered $1,000,000 of the Fortress Bible leaving TOV (again a zoning matter so villagers had no liability) compelled to pay up. The town bonded the $5,500,000 with payments payable over 10 years (with interest, the payment by taxpayers was much larger). At the time, I took the assessed values of a number of homes on Mercer Ave, which were probably slightly above average in value for TOV, and I then calculated that the Fortress Bible judgment would cost my neighbors individually on average about $350 over the bond's ten years to fund that settlement.
While we're getting close to the end of the Fortress Bible settlement bond payments, now we'll have to start paying for the Dromore settlement which at $6,750,000 exceeds the Fortress Bible settlement of $5,500,000.
How much will Dromore cost residents?
I asked a muni bond expert to review the numbers with me. We'll ballpark this number based on a few estimates. I'm going to assume that the Town will issue a ten year bond again like the Town did to fund the Fortress Bible settlement. This time the bond will fund $6,750,000. Bond interest rates are low, but rising, and the bond won't be issued immediately, so we'll go with an estimate of 2.00%. With an annual principal being paid of $675,000 at 2% interest, the actual payout by taxpayers would be $7,492,500 over the ten years.
Funding the Dromore bond would require a 1.37% increase in the current B (unincorporated) budget. The Greenburgh town tax rate is currently 6.12112 per mil for TOV property owners. A homeowner with a $500,000 assessment currently pays $3,061 dollars in town taxes per year (remember that town taxes do not include school, fire district and county taxes). Someone with a home valued at $750,000 pays $4,591 in town taxes, etc.
For the Dromore settlement, the $500,000 home owner will pay an extra $41.39 in taxes next year and a minimum of $325 over the course of the ten year settlement. Similarly, the $750,000 homeowner will pay an extra $62.90 next year, and a minimum of $485 over the entire settlement.
Add in Fortress Bible and you can see that typical TOV single family homeowners will have the pleasure of paying from $560 to more than $850 in additional property taxes arising from these two mostly uninsured, town board litigation fiascos.
Granted, these extra taxes are being paid out over 18 years. Except for the first few years of the Fortress Bible payments, all such tax increases are non-deductible because of the SALT cap. These estimates do not include more than $ $4,000,000 in litigation payments to outside lawyers already incurred by the town for Dromore.
So bottom line: how much is Dromore going to cost me? I estimate a minimum of $436. Then add in my share of the legal costs, which I'll guess as costing the town about $500,000 per year over the past 6 years in additional property taxes (about 75% of the town budget is paid for from property taxes), or a very rough 1% increase in property taxes for each of those years. As a result, I'll guess that I've already paid above $200 for the litigation costs. In conclusion, I'll estimate that I have - and will have - paid cumulatively at least $986 in additional property taxes for these two settlements.
Well Dan, it looked like you were going to tell readers how much it would cost them yet knowing that taxpayers pay taxes in annual amounts, you have managed to avoid providing the intimated simple answer as the payoff for slogging through your entire post. An effort which need not be so not difficult if one has learned division (in this case dividing your totals by the number of years remaining) or at least knowing how to operate a calculator to do the math. But you have made it difficult by creating separate accounts, Fortress, Dromore, Legal: all of which are appearin your work-up but for some reason not combined into to an annual expense number that persons planning their family budgets can use. I suspect that due to your announced Tasha loyalties, under the guise of providing useful information you have succumbed to a preference for horror movies where the objective is to scare the pants off ticket buyers. So, what you have done is shift the focus to the scary large numbers which are not the numbers that residents pay using the contents of their wallets. Such an effort would be appreciated and evocative of fair play; especially since Tasha, without occupying a seat of power or ever coming within a country mile of such a large budget as the Town's ($90 million give or take) and, with such funds under her control, cannot be criticized for how she would have handled the matters which resulted in financial losses. And, from what you and anyone examing her Board of Elections filings knows, we already recognize that Tasha can't manage money well, even her own campaign funds peaking at the $40,000 level. Those committed to supporting Feiner this year do so because spending two years with Tasha would be the scariest horror movie ever: one shot entirely on location in Greenburgh NY.
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