Posted March 6, 2000 Lessons of an Older Suburb By Rob Gurwitt On the day last week that the assessor in Nassau County, New York, announced that the county’s properties needed to be reassessed, a television crew set itself up outside the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Mineola and started buttonholing passers-by. What did they think about the announcement, the reporter with the microphone wanted to know. “Our taxes are already too high,” grumbled an elderly man. “Oh, good,” the reporter said. “Come over here to the camera.” And she gathered him in for an interview. It was a predictable and easy ploy by the media: Taxes might go up? Go out and find an angry homeowner. Nowhere in the reporter’s questions, though, did she explore the real question: Why have these same homeowners been content to let their leaders get away without a reassessment for 62 years? That’s right. Properties in Nassau, a patch of Long Island that ranks among the wealthiest counties in the country, haven’t been assessed since 1938. The homes people live in are taxed not on their market worth, but on what they would have cost to construct when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. There’s a lot to criticize in this state of affairs, not least the fact that people making, say, $20,000 a year have been paying the same property taxes as people making 10 times as much and living in much more valuable homes. And the fact that over the last decade, Nassau County has had to pay out more than $1 billion — funded by bonds — to people who’ve challenged their property taxes in court. But there’s another point to be made, as well. Although Nassau has plenty of towns filled with well-off residents living on well-tended streets, it also shows all the signs of aging seen in inner suburbs all over the country. As a whole, its demographics have grown far more ethnically and racially diverse than they were a few decades ago, as has the mix of classes who live there. Its social service costs have been rising as well. For many years the county executive, Republican Tom Gulotta, has boasted of holding the line on taxes, but with Nassau’s bonds now a single level above junk grade and its budget running a $100 million deficit every year, it’s clear that taxes will have to rise. In other words, it’s likely that higher taxes will soon be buying a declining bundle of services, the classic mix that gets older communities into trouble. Nassau might serve as a stark reminder, then, that for all the forces promoting growth out on the suburban fringe, the most important thing older suburbs can do for themselves is to make sure their own houses are in order. Nassau County’s residents and its leaders enjoyed the benefits of political timidity for a long time. Now it’s caught up with them, and the one thing that’s certain about the future is that no one is going to enjoy the process of setting things aright. Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing Magazine. Agree? Disagree? Want to expand on a point? E-mail us at mailbox@governing.com, and we'll post your comments here. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes). Previously in View: The Power of a Non-Apology: getting what you want by owning up (posted March 1, 2000) Sprawl Forever: growth control and political backbone (posted February 25, 2000) Tainted Money: paying the price for the LAPD scandal (posted February 22, 2000) Ventura’s Unicameral Victory: how the Minnesota governor will win either way (posted February 18, 2000) Questioning Authority: the consequences of divided rule (posted February 10, 2000) Taxation Without Misreprentation: taxing the Internet (posted February 2, 2000) Too Much Democracy: control of the schools (posted January 24, 2000) The Art of Apology: politicians and regret (posted January 18, 2000) The State vs. the Wild, Wild Web: regulating the Internet (posted January 14, 2000) Back from the Dead: party control in the South (posted January 11, 2000) Welcome to Governing.com (posted January 2, 2000) Copyright © 2000, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc.