Message from the Mayor: Halloween and other festivities, consolidating assessments.

Fellow Residents;
 
We have a couple of things to cover here. First, entertainment and then a longer discourse on adopting the assessment roll:
 
Halloween Events
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Thursday, October 27th, 6PM
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We start early with a Pumpkin Carving event at the James Harmon Community Center at 6PM.  Bring your pumpkin and join the festivities.  Pumpkins can be displayed at the "mini-blaze" at the event described next, below.
 
Friday, October 28 6PM to 9PM
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Our annual Friday Night Dead tradition, held up in the parking lot of the Pool (rechristened as the Chemka Ghoul)(OK, so puns aren't our strong suite). The pool house is transformed into a Scary House, more suitable for the younger set with nothing that should leave lasting scars from 6PM to 7:30PM, and then they let it rip, so to speak, afterwards from 7:30 to 9PM. There's music and food and the pleasure of each other's company up in the parking lot the entire time.
 
Saturday, October 29
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10:00am - 2:00pm
Downtown Window Painting - (pre-register at Harmon Community Center, pick up your paints in front of the Ambulance Corps.)
From 12:30 to 3:30, lunch and bingo for Seniors at the Rec Center, co-sponsored by the Hastings PBA.
2:00PM Howl-O-Ween Pet Parade from 585 Warburton to the Chase Parking Lot. (I wasn't kidding about the puns.). This is likely to be amusing.
 
Sunday, October 30
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10:00AM Bug a Boo Halloween Walk - meet at the Hillside Elementary School traffic circle and join the search for creatures that send shivers up your spine.
12:00pm Halloween Parade - Starts at 12:00pm in front of the Community Center, with select merchants handing out treats. Kids, come dressed. Parents, too.  Includes petting zoo, music, bouncy house, food, games, face painting and more.
12:30 - 3:00 Senior Halloween Party - be daring and wear a costume. Join for lunch at the Community Center, music provided by the Dixieland Jazz Band.
 
 
PTSA Book Fair – Oct 27th to 31st
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The PTSA throws its new book fair this October 27th through October 31st  and an absurd number of books are there for your perusing at an absurdly low price.  Hours and more information here
 
Harvest Moon Ball. November 5th
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One of the nice traditions in this village, open to anyone, at the High School Corcoran Gym from 7PM to 9:30.  The very adept High School band crank out jazz and big band standards and you dance. And eat dessert brought by parents. Kind of hard to argue. Charming, old-fashioned and fun.  $10/seniors, $15/adults.
 
Project SHARE dinner, November 22nd
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Thanksgiving is a month away and my first reminder to support the absurdly successful and meaningful Project Share Thanksgiving dinner that is run at the High School.  Jeannie Newman and crew organize her adult and student volunteers to cook and then host a full Thanksgiving day meal with turkey and the works for 800 homeless people (yes, eighth *hundred*) at the High School gym. It's a lovely and deeply moving moment and in this moment of electoral madness, it seems a particularly good way to salve the soul.  Go here and give freely.
 
Assessment Roll Consolidation
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We have a public hearing kicking off the Board Meeting on November 1st on the seemingly tedious topic of "Consolidating Assessment Rolls".  The Village maintains its own assessment roll, which is a listing of what we believe is every house's value, originally set sixty years ago and never really adjusted since then unless you filed for a building permit or provoked an inspection for whatever reason and this resulted in a reassessment.  The values there are expressed in 1960's dollars - truly confusing - and these are trued up with today's dollars via a factor that is supplied annually by the State.  Absolutely archaic and hopelessly outdated. 
 
The Town of Greenburgh has just finished updating its assessment roll through the reassessment process which dominated the news earlier this year. (Their assessment roll is used to set taxes for the school district, town and county). The Public Hearing next Tuesday is to hear about your input regarding the Village’s seeking to abandon its assessment roll and adopt Greenburgh’s roll. We will save the cost of maintaining and defending our own roll against certiori cases (legal cases brought to challenge assessment amounts), as well as a reduction of certiori cases in the long term as our assessment roll proves easier to defend.  It is hard to value this in total, but is probably on the order of $40,000 in savings a year (about a half  percent in your taxes) plus greater stability in our rolls. Villagers will have a single assessment for their house, in today’s dollars. If you choose to challenge it, you will only have to challenge it in one location.  Will it affect your Village taxes, which constitute 20% of the real estate taxes you pay?  While it is hard to say for certain, if the reassessment process yielded a likely increase in your school taxes, it will likely yield an increase in your Village taxes.  It works the other way too – if your taxes stayed roughly the same or went down, your Village taxes will likely follow.
 
That’s as good a segue as any to briefly discuss the inter-relationship between assessments and taxes, a topic of general confusion and one that took me many passes at it before I finally “got it”.  The Village assessment roll is used to set what portion of the Village's expenses you pay in taxes.  To slightly over-simplify, if your house is worth $500,000 and the entire assessed total of *all* houses in the Village are worth $50,000,000 (these numbers are made up for purpose of this example), your house is worth 1% of all the housing value in the Village.  You would, in the end, land up paying roughly 1% of the Village budget via taxes.  If your house value goes up relative to others, you’ll pay more of the budget, and if it goes down, you will pay less.  If, as a result of the reassessment, the overall total assessed value of the Village went up 20%, it doesn’t mean more tax money was raised. It’s all about how your value went up compared to everyone else’s.  If your value went up 20%, your taxes won’t change – you’re still 1% of the Village total assessed value.  But if your value went up 140% to $120,000, then you would now be 2% of the Village total and would pay twice as much taxes.  I doubt I made any of that clearer, but there you go.  Your assessed value makes sense only in the context of the entire assessed value of the Village – the goal here is to get everyone to pay their fair share and save the Village an unnecessary expense.
 
Finally, as part of folding our assessment roll into Grennburgh’s, we would need to look at the exemptions we currently offer or could consider offering.  We currently offer a needs-based exemption for seniors, and a general exemption for volunteer firefighters.  We would consider also other exemptions, including one for veterans.  The table here lays out what we offer and what Greenburgh offers.  This won’t be a part of the Public Hearing on Tuesday, but we will be talking about it in the Board Discussion.
 
Yard Waste
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Finally, on a separate and unrelated note. The leaves come down now. Ideally, you mow over them and mulch them into your lawn (see here for more information). Or rake them into the woods or bushes on your property to properly decay into whence they came.  But if you must, you can bag them and leave them out front for pick-up every Wednesday.  We urge you to keep a part or all of them on your property where they can do the best good. (And rake them, if you can - leaf blowers are generally unnecessary on most of our smaller lawns.) 
 
Thank you for your patience with this longer note and all the best in this beautiful season.
 
Sincerely,
 
Peter Swiderski
Mayor