Scarsdale – A Beautiful Community at a Crossroads

Scarsdale is a very special community, but it is at an important crossroads. Many residents have lost confidence in Village government, Village administrators and staff, and the judgment and leadership of the Mayor and Trustees, especially following the disastrous 2016 JF Ryan property tax revaluation. Empty nesters, the bedrock of the community, are leaving because of the ever-increasing property tax burden and the misallocation of that tax burden. I am running for Mayor of Scarsdale, because I want to contribute my experience, knowledge of Village issues, judgment, and the vision to regain the public’s confidence and to assure that Village government serves our community in a user friendly and fiscally responsible manner. I have been working and will continue to work hard to earn your vote.

I have been a Scarsdale resident for the past 14 years. I have served as a Director, Vice President, and President of my neighborhood association, Berkley-in-Scarsdale (“Crane Berkley”), and I am currently its President. I have served as a Director, Secretary, Vice President, President, and Executive Committee member of the Scarsdale Forum, and I am presently a Director and Chair of its Assessment Revaluation Committee. I am a member of SNAP (“Scarsdale Neighborhood Associations Presidents). I sit as a member of the Scarsdale Town Board of Assessment Review, which decides property tax grievances filed by Village property owners.

I am a practicing attorney, and I am a seasoned class action attorney. I represent plaintiffs, typically consumers or individual investors, who have been defrauded by major corporations. I am presently a partner at Denlea & Carton LLP, an eight lawyer boutique law firm in White Plains, New York. I have achieved class action settlements, which have recovered over one billion dollars for defrauded consumers and shareholders.

I attended the Wantagh, New York public schools, and I graduated its high school as class valedictorian in 1975. I attended Amherst College, where I double majored in economics and psychology. I graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. degree cum laude in 1979. Beginning in the Fall of 1979, I attended both the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in a joint degree program. I received my J.D. and M.B.A. degrees in June 1983.

Why do Property Assessments Matter?

I was the leading proponent for the first town-wide property revaluation in Scarsdale in 45 years. When property valuations are not kept up to date through periodic town-wide revaluations – generally no more than 5 years apart -- tremendous inequities can build up in the taxation of substantially similar properties. That proved to be the case in Scarsdale, where the Village Staff and Board of Trustees failed to conduct a town-wide property revaluation for an astonishingly long 45 years.

The report I wrote as Chair of the Scarsdale Forum’s Assessment Revaluation Committee’s report led to the Village Board authorizing the 2014 revaluation performed by Tyler Technologies, the leading company conducting municipal revaluations nationwide. That revaluation involved interior inspection of more than 95 percent of Scarsdale properties – an astoundingly high number resulting from Scarsdale property owners’ extraordinary cooperation with the revaluation process.

Any mass appraisal of almost 6,000 properties will have some errors, and the Tyler revaluation was no exception. However, most Scarsdalians felt that the Tyler revaluation was conducted professionally and with due process protections. Moreover, property owners had the opportunity to grieve the result if they disagreed with the valuation. After two years of grievances following the Tyler revaluation, in my opinion, Scarsdale’s assessment roll was the most equitable in at least 50 years. I was very proud to have been a leader in finally bringing property tax equity to Scarsdale.

However, a small number of property owners who faced substantially higher property tax bills as a result of the Tyler revaluation complained bitterly about the Tyler revaluation to the Village Board and Village Manager. In response to pressure from the Village Board and Manager, the Village Assessor arranged for John Ryan, who had acted as the Village’s independent monitor for the Tyler revaluation – and who had been paid $110,000 to oversee and to bless the Tyler revaluation as being fair and accurate, to present to the Village Board Finance Committee a $245,000 no-bid proposal for Ryan to conduct a second town-wide revaluation to be completed in 2016.

At every opportunity, I spoke out publicly and vigorously against this ill-conceived project from the outset of its public disclosure at Village Board meetings, in letters to the editor, and in news stories in the local press. I spoke during the public comment session at the Board of Trustees meeting on April 26, 2016 – days after Ryan gave a disastrous presentation at a critical but poorly publicized revaluation update meeting to the Board. I pointed out the red flags raised by Ryan’s continued refusal at that meeting to disclose any details about his model in advance of the filing of the tentative roll, his inability to explain in a lucid manner how his utterly new methodology would improve upon the accuracy of the 2014 Tyler valuations, and the lack of any due process procedure for an informal review of the valuations by owners and Ryan or the Assessor prior to the filing of the tentative roll on June 1, 2016. I proclaimed that the Ryan revaluation was a train wreck waiting to happen in a few short weeks, and I strenuously urged the Village Board and Mayor to pull the plug and delay the Ryan revaluation for one year to allow for adequate testing of Ryan’s valuation model.

The Mayor and the Board chose to allow the Ryan revaluation to proceed. As we all know by now, unfortunately, the train wreck I predicted happened on June 1, 2016 once the tentative roll was filed by the Assessor. The ensuring community uproar over the Ryan revaluation has been unprecedented in Scarsdale history.

Draining the Swamp

Donald Trump talks a lot about “draining the swamp.” Unlike Trump, I have actually drained the swamp – that is, the Crane Berkley ponds and stream. The Crane Berkley neighborhood residents own a private 6-acre park which includes two ponds and a stream surrounded by two open fields. Since the development of the Crane Berkley neighborhood in the late 1920s, the Village has, without compensation to the property owners, used this private park as a drainage basin for Village storm water runoff. Indeed, about 90 Village storm drains directly empty into the drainage basin and a stream enters the basin under Popham Road. The storm-water runoff carries sand, organic matter, and other road debris from Village roads into the private Crane Berkley waterways, and eventually they silt up and require dredging.

A few years ago, after I had become President of Crane Berkley for the second time, my Board and I decided that the waterways needed to be dredged again. The small pond especially had become choked with silt and unsightly and malodorous algae blooms every summer. Mosquito infestation became a serious problem as well. My Park Commissioner and I researched ways to maintain healthy ponds.

I then approached Village Manager Gatta and Deputy Village Manager Pappalardo and explained our need to conduct a dredging project to restore the health of the waterway system. Over the course of numerous meetings with Village staff, including the Village Manager, Deputy Village Manager, Benedict Salanitro, the Superintendent of Public Works, Wayne Esanason, the Village Attorney, and the Village Engineer, I explained my neighborhood’s view that the Village’s use of our private land as a drainage basin, and in particular, the Village’s failure to maintain the Popham Road sump, had led to the serious siltation of our waterways and the resultant damage to our park.

Village staff recognized the problem, and were willing to discuss a solution. I eventually negotiated a complex, equitable public-private cost sharing arrangement whereby the Village would pay for approximately half of the cost of the project and Crane Berkley property owners would pay for half. Under the contemplated financial agreement, the Village would use its bonding power to issue municipal bonds to pay for the project. Crane Berkley residents would then be responsible for reimbursing the Village for the funds it advanced to cover the residents’ share of the project. Because the Crane Berkley by-laws provided no mechanism to assure that residents paid their pro rata share of the project, we worked with Village Staff to craft a special provision of the Village Code that created a Special Crane Berkley Tax District to collect each Crane Berkley property owner’s allocated share as part of his or her Village tax bill. This structure allows the property owners to pay their shares over a multi-year period and to deduct such payments from their tax returns if they itemize their deductions.

This complicated, multi-faceted project cost about $600,000, with the Village paying about half the cost. The Village Staff and the Crane Berkley residents have cooperated throughout, and we expect the project to be very successful. This dredging project enabled me to work cooperatively and very successfully with Village Staff and Crane Berkley residents over a period of several years to achieve an outstanding resolution to a difficult, recurring problem.