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Judge Bruce Tolbert ruled on Friday that the oft-discussed 2016 village-wide revaluation would stand, despite a vocal group of residents that requested the court roll back valuations to the 2015 assessment.
The Article 78 proceeding requesting the rollback to 2015 valuations was filed in January last year.
The judge ruled that “all of the residents of Scarsdale were treated the same in the sense of the revaluation being the method of the assessment of the tax roll. There is neither random, nor disparate treatment under this fact pattern.”
Tolbert dismissed the entire Article 78 case in its entirety, stating that “upon full review, this court finds that there is no basis pursuant to Article 78 to this court to require the municipality to act in the forum that it was meant to be addressed in.”
According to the Scarsdale Committee for a Fair Taxation’s co-chairs Mayra Kirkendall-Rodriguez and Greg Soldantenko, the court issued its ruling on the grounds that the organization “was not a proper plaintiff.”
“The judge ignored the basis of the claim that the formula used to put together the tax roll was biased in favor of larger homes, resulting in larger homes being assessed on average less than 90 percent of market value, while smaller homes were assessed at 100 percent or more. The court did not even mention the basis for the claim, or distinguish the legal authorities we cited to show that this violates equal protection demonstrates that, if residents are still interested, this case should be appealed.“
The Scarsdale Committee for a Fair Taxation will now have 30 days to appeal the decision. It was not immediately clear whether that was their intention. The judge’s complete ruling can be found here.
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