Z Genius Lusifer

While it is easy to hate the assessor, think for a minute and realize that the assessor is doing you a favor by raising your property value.

The people who you elect that have total control over the budgets and the net result of a tax RATE is the enemy.  Most of the time these people who sit on the boards cannot even balance their own checkbook but deal with millions of dollars of expenditure. They blindly dig into your pocket. 

A game that is played over and over is the Scare and Stroke play.  The board comes out with a huge 23 percent increase in taxes as a first cut, then works it down to 8 or 9.23524 percent increase proclaiming many hours of toil and many meetings held -they worked hard for you to decrease your tax rate.......every year people swallow the hook......

Budget process should start out with ZERO growth and work down from there, if there are items that NEED to be added then they should be pulled out separately, shown to the public the impact and listen to the public for opinion.  What is done is that the extra's are buried into the budget making it near impossible for the average taxpayer to find and understand.

We need to know how the tax rate is built and what pieces represent what expenses.  Not as the School does it in HUGE categories but broken out into small chunks that are easy to understand.

The assessor is just helping you with the following:

• A higher property value to get more home equity funding
• Making sure the shift in value goes to the right areas.  Lake property is selling hotter so it should be valued higher and they should be paying more. (for example)
• You may be able to eliminate PMI insurance if you can prove your value is at least 20 percent higher than your mortgage value
• Higher credit scores resulting in lower interest rates on loans.
• Increasing your net worth for purposes of retirement nest egging.

So thank your assessor next time you see them.  Put your board members to task with lowering the spending especially in the Village of Seneca Falls and the Seneca Falls Central School District.

I think the School District is the worse for increasing costs with no feeling of guilt for raising the rates.  The game is played where it pulls at the heart strings for some to hear "It's for the kids" when in fact it is from no regard to lowering the tax rate.

Last school budget session there was talk of letting teachers go, when the district "found" some money by reducing benefits, they still kept the teachers that were identified because of the new found money.  WHY did they not go through with their plan to lower the tax rate?

I would like to see our bond debt over the past 10 years.  Has it increased? Who knows?  Another key piece of the puzzle left out for us to know about the secret projects being funded by coming in under bid and reallocating funds to questionable projects.  How many times has this occured?  More than you think!

Our per student cost is over $14,000 dollars where comparable school districts spend around $11,000 per student.  Enough is ENOUGH.

Lusifers take: If it continues (tax increases) then a higher assessable value on your home will help sell it at a higher price so you can move out of Seneca Falls TAX HELL.