New York State’s 2 percent tax cap, first signed into law in 2011 and renewed periodically since then, is now permanent.
Governor Andrew Cuomo included making the cap permanent in his 2019-2020 state budget, and the State Legislature obliged. Mr. Cuomo’s office says the tax cap has already saved taxpayers $24.4 billion since it was first implemented in 2012.
The tax cap restricts the annual growth of a local government or school district’s tax levy to 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. A number of other factors go into calculating an individual municipality’s cap in a given fiscal year, such as the value of new homes and commercial buildings added to the tax rolls, so the cap can actually exceed 2 percent.
A school district can pierce the cap if a 60 percent supermajority of voters approves, as opposed to the simple majority of 50 percent plus one vote that is normally required to adopt a budget. However, the state has offered an extra incentive to stay within the cap: tax rebate checks for qualifying property-tax payers living in districts that complied with the cap.
“We drew a line in the sand with the cap so that families wouldn’t be priced out of their homes and to make our state more business friendly,” State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. of Sag Harbor said in a statement. “The cap makes New York more affordable, and has saved homeowners thousands of dollars.”
on Apr 8, 2019