Ferrer Turns Campaign to Reduction in Property Tax
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The Democratic candidate for mayor, Fernando Ferrer, is turning to tax cuts as his campaign to unseat Mayor Bloomberg enters its closing stretch.
Mr. Ferrer yesterday proposed a tax cut that would save city homeowners nearly $1,000. The cut would be nearly $600 more than the rebates Mayor Bloomberg began issuing in 2004, more than a year after he raised property taxes by a record 18.5%.
Mr. Ferrer said his proposal would reduce the tax bill by $973 for New Yorkers who own homes valued at $800,000 or less. His plan targets the middle class, which he said has shrunk because of Mayor Bloomberg’s “regressive tax hikes.” He’d pay for it in part by raising income taxes – actually, by extending an existing surcharge that is scheduled to expire – on those earning more than $500,000 a year.
“Since Mike Bloomberg took over, the chasm between the haves and have-nots in New York has grown,” Mr. Ferrer said. “More and more people now live not in the steady, hard-earned abundance that middle-class life in this city once meant, but in a precarious state.”
With less than three weeks to go be fore the election, Mr. Ferrer’s plan comes with his campaign languishing in the polls and marks a return to his longtime theme of “two New Yorks,” one for the rich and one for the poor. He said his proposal would help remedy the mayor’s property tax hike, as well as increases in other fees.
“These tax hikes have pushed many New Yorkers into that other New York that I’ve spoken about so many times before, and that the mayor, this mayor, maybe knows exists but has done nothing about in four years,” Mr. Ferrer said.
He said his plan, called the Homeowner Property Exemption, or HOPE, would erase the property tax burden for those who own homes valued at $100,000 or less. For owners of higher priced homes, the cuts would amount to significant portions of their property tax bill. New Yorkers with homes valued at more than $800,000 would continue to get a $400 rebate, Mr. Ferrer said. Mayor Bloomberg pushed the rebate through in 2004 after initially increasing property taxes to deal with a mounting budget deficit in 2002.
Mr. Ferrer cast the mayor’s rebate as a desperate attempt to mollify homeowners angry at a property tax hike. “These are simply not the actions of a man who believes in tax relief for those who need it most,” he said of Mr. Bloomberg. “They are the actions of a politician who was scrambling for his political life.”
The Ferrer tax proposal drew criticism from the Bloomberg campaign, which said Mr. Ferrer had switched his position multiple times on the original property tax increase and the subsequent $400 rebate.
“Freddy supported the original tax increase, but later opposed it. And Freddy opposed the property tax rebate but later supported it,” a spokesman for the mayor’s campaign, Stuart Loeser, said in a statement. “Freddy Ferrer’s proposals are as convoluted and contradictory as all of his previous positions on this issue, which for him is par for the course.”
A top aide in Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign, William Cunningham, also scoffed at Mr. Ferrer’s chance of implementing his plan, since it would require legislative approval in Albany.
“He has almost no chance of getting his proposal through the Legislature,” Mr. Cunningham said.
Mr. Ferrer unveiled his proposal yesterday as he stood in front of a modest single-family house in Little Neck, Queens, where he was flanked by Rep. Anthony Weiner and a City Council member, David Weprin.
As a challenger to Mr. Ferrer in the Democratic primary, Mr. Weiner proposed millions of dollars in tax cuts for the middle class. Yesterday he stood in support of Mr. Ferrer’s plan by criticizing Mr. Bloomberg. “If you think that rising taxes are not a problem for this city, then Mike Bloomberg is the man for you, because he says that there are going to be four more years of the same,” Mr. Weiner said. Mr. Ferrer was “offering a plan to make New York more affordable,” he said. “That’s what this election is all about.”
Mr. Ferrer estimated the cost of the cuts at $672 million, part of which would come from using funds now allocated for the $400 rebate. He said he would extend an added income tax on New Yorkers making more than $500,000, which he said could generate $380 million a year. Mr. Ferrer said he was also hoping to secure $75 million in reimbursements from the state for the city’s incarceration of inmates who have awaited trial for more than a year.
In composing his tax plan, Mr. Ferrer took pages out of the playbooks of his former Democratic opponents, Mr. Weiner and Gifford Miller, the City Council speaker. Mr. Miller had offered to extend the tax on the wealthy, while Mr. Weiner floated the idea of getting the state to pay back the city for housing inmates.
A spokesman for the Independent Budget Office, Douglas Turetsky, expressed skepticism at what he said was a complicated proposal from Mr. Ferrer.
“The approach seems to just add more patchwork to an already crazy quilt system,” Mr. Turetsky said. Mr. Ferrer’s proposal ignores commercial properties, he said, which shoulder a large portion of the city’s tax burden. “It’s arguable that single-family homeowners are actually the most protected,” he said.
The executive vice president of the non-partisan Citizens Budget Commission, Charles Brecher, also noted the exclusion of commercial property owners from Mr. Ferrer’s plan. He criticized an extension of the tax on the wealthy, saying it would make the city less attractive to high-income earners.
“It’s certainly not good for the competitiveness of the city,” Mr. Brecher said. “We would view it as something that’s likely to be harmful.”
Mr. Turetsky had more praise for another element of Mr. Ferrer’s proposal that would provide nearly $50 million in tax relief to the city’s low- and moderate-income renters. Under the plan, New Yorkers making less than $60,000 a year who have at least one child living with them would get an income tax credit equal to 3% of their annual rent. The average annual benefit, Mr. Ferrer said, would be $295.
Renters make up two-thirds of the city’s property tax base, Mr. Turetsky said. “They shoulder a large part of the tax burden, and he’s trying to address that,” he said. “And that’s a positive.”