FOCUS: PROPERTY TAXES
Erie County homes of equal value impose unequal tax burdens on owners
Size of tax base and kinds of municipal services result in dissimilar bills for comparable homes
It’s outrageous. That’s what Bob Barczak and Mike Tarbell both say about Barczak’s tax bill for his Cheektowaga colonial last year: $6,731.12.
Barczak’s tax bill is more than double what Tarbell paid on his Clarence home: $3,198.61.
And the kicker: The two homes have the same full-market value.
Where you live really does matter when it comes to paying your share of taxes in Erie County, but maybe not in the way you would think.
A comparison of the taxes paid on a $150,000 full-market-value house in every municipality and school district in Erie County shows seven of the highest taxes are in first-ring suburbs, including five in Cheektowaga.
Granted, it is not a perfect comparison. There is no perfect comparison, but it is as close as possible to an apples-to-apples comparison. And it’s startling.
While this area frequently is cited as having some of the highest taxes in the nation, not every local community is as highly taxed as the others. The lowest taxes are in the southeastern section of the county, for those living in the Pioneer School District in Sardinia, according to a calculation by the state Office of Real Property Tax Services.
A combination of factors accounts for the varying tax bills:
• Larger towns closer to Buffalo provide more services, like police protection, than those farther from the core.
• First-ring suburbs are losing population — and the tax base — to pay for those services.
• First-ring suburbs have little room to grow.
• Smaller, rural towns provide fewer services, but have room for an expanding tax base.
The survey does not include special districts in the calculation of town and highway taxes, because they vary depending on the district.
Barczak, a sales representative, and his wife, Karen, a nutritionist for Buffalo Public Schools, were looking for a new home, but wanted to stay in the community where they are active.
Karen Barczak drove street to street within the Doyle Hose No. 1 fire district, where her husband is a volunteer firefighter. She found an empty lot on Girard Avenue, still in the Cheektowaga/Sloan School District, and they built their dream house in 1996.
Then they got their tax bills on their 2,100-square-foot home, which has a full market value of $151,000.
“We kind of wanted to stay in the area, but it’s costing us a lot of money,” she said.
“We’re thoroughly disgusted as far as taxes go,” Barczak said.
It’s a nice neighborhood, they say, but they don’t have the benefits of living in Clarence.
Disgusted with taxes
That’s where Tarbell lives in his 1,500-square-foot house on Shisler Road, 20 minutes from downtown. When he built it in 1988, it was assessed at $78,000, he said. Today it has a full-value assessment of $150,000.
He’s disgusted with taxes, too, and notes his taxes don’t pay for garbage collection, and he doesn’t have sewers. He says the large, expensive homes being built in his town have skewed the numbers for everyone.
“I think it’s outrageous to live in Sloan and pay that kind of money. I think it’s outrageous to live in Clarence and pay this,” Tarbell said.
Generally, the more services provided, the more expensive it is to live in a municipality.
But where there is population decline, the number of services often don’t decrease at the same rate, said Mark Muro, policy director of the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. At the same time, there may be a need for more services to serve those who stay.
As a consequence, individual tax rates go up to support the services needed because of the population decline, he said.
“The areas where you have deteriorating urban or suburban health are going to be flash points and are likely going to see high and rising taxes to offset decline, combined with the same, or even more services,” he said.
But those in the outlying areas might not want to relax, according to Muro. “Given the way places have grown and developed in metropolitan areas in last 20 years, most areas are actually precarious. Taxes will remain low for a while, until they begin to spike,” he said.
It’s difficult to compare taxes from one community to another, because some bills include garbage pickup, strong recreation programs and fire and police departments.
“Communities make different choices about their service tax package,” said Kate Foster, director of the University at Buffalo Regional Institute. “Some of them do sewer inhouse and water in-house, and some don’t.”
She notes that special district taxes are not included in town taxes in this study, but village taxes, which would include payment for many of those same types of services, are included.
“The bottom line is, it’s not so much the amount people are paying, it’s the bang for the buck. What are they getting for what they’re paying?” Foster said.
School taxes add up
School tax bills typically account for at least half of a homeowner’s total property bill. But there are wide differences. The Cheektowaga/Sloan School District, for instance, shows some of the highest school taxes (roughly $3,200 for a $150,000 house) compared with $1,200 for Buffalo (where state aid is especially generous).
“The largest share of property taxes is the school districts,” said James Ostrowski, the founder of Free Buffalo, a taxpayer advocacy group. “I’ve never understood this concept of school districts, and why we need them. They’re basically independent governments.”
And it is because of the school taxes, and to a lesser extent the village taxes, that residents living in the Cheektowaga/Sloan School District in the Village of Sloan have the dubious distinction of having the highest total bill in the county: $6,839, based on a $150,000 market value home.
“The average person isn’t paying anywhere near that amount,” maintains Superintendent James P. Mazgajewski. “People would not be living in Sloan if they were paying $6,800 in taxes.”
He said the survey is misleading, because Sloan doesn’t have many homes with that high of a value, and the average school taxes are $1,200 to $1,800.
“We have about a half dozen of those homes. They were brand new builds,” he said.
While there aren’t too many houses with a full-value assessment of $150,000 in the working-class Cheektowaga/ Sloan School District, there aren’t too many in assessment-rich Clarence, either.
The average house in Clarence, the county’s wealthiest suburb, sells for $261,000. So the average tax bill in that town will be higher than the average in Sloan.
Sloan is landlocked and has nowhere to expand, and meantime, people are leaving the area.
“The pattern is very familiar and not a healthy one,” said Muro of the Brookings Institution. “It’s too small to be able to support service provision. It’s probably not the most sought after place to be now.”
Cheektowaga Supervisor Mary Holtz echoed Mazgajewski and said the average tax bill in town is not over $6,000. But the town is beset with the problems of a first-ring suburb: aging infrastructure, which is costly to repair or replace; no room for new growth; and a growing number of vacant homes. Twenty percent of business properties are vacant, and there are about 700 vacant homes, she said.
“If I can get these houses back on the tax rolls it will make a difference,” Holtz said, but she added, “Cheektowaga will never have the high $300,000 to $400,000 house.”
The town also has a large amount of tax-free property with the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, 800 acres of cemeteries and the Thruway running through the town.
Few services, low tax
Elma is among the lowest-taxed towns, and Supervisor Michael P. Nolan likes to credit fiscal restraint and good planning. The town does not levy any general tax, and the highway tax is about $37 for a $150,000 house. But services are minimal. The town does not have its own police force but provides a station for Erie County sheriff’s deputies and State Police in Town Hall.
There’s no garbage pickup either. For $90 a year, residents take their garbage to a transfer station open four days a week. Some may pay a private contractor to come to their house weekly.
The town shares youth recreation with Wales and Marilla. And while Clarence has grown in numbers, Elma has grown in assessed value but not in population.
“We have more homes, but we don’t have more people, we’re still at about 11,000,” Nolan said.
There have been some overtures to slow the growth in taxes.
Gov. David A. Paterson has endorsed a property tax cap on school district tax levies — the total amount to be raised through taxes — to 4 percent, or 120 percent of the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. The State Legislature failed to act on the proposal earlier this month.
“This cap on taxes at 4 percent is still too high,” said Jane Wiercioch, president of the Depew/Cheektowaga Taxpayers Association. “I just don’t know where all this is going to end.”
Muro of the Brookings Institution said what would work better would be a more stable metropolitan area where people are not constantly moving on to the next place. It’s possible to change the dynamic, and $4 gasoline may be one of the factors that helps turn the drift around, he said.
“The law of the land for 30 years has been a drift outward, the abandonment of the center, the colonization of new ex-urban areas,” he said. “In that dynamic, nowhere is particularly stable.”
That doesn’t help the Barczaks today, who live in a nice house in a community they love — and are paying dearly for it.
“I really question if I did the right thing,” Barczak said.
News Staff Reporter Mary B. Pasciak contributed to this report.
