Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax is coming apart in court, and the reason is not ideology. It is paperwork. Four more New Yorkers have joined the lawsuit seeking to pause the surcharge on luxury second homes over what the plaintiffs call the Mamdani administration’s botched rollout — including one Manhattan owner who says the city mailed his tax notice to a neighbor living 27 floors below him, the New York Post reported.
Kenneth Fishel, a real estate executive who has paid taxes for years out of his Park Avenue co-op on the Upper East Side, learned he was on the hook only by accident. “Fishel only learned of and obtained a copy of the notice because he ran into his neighbor living 27 floors below him on the elevator,” the Tuesday filing states.
“If I hadn’t run into him in the elevator, I never would have known, and I would have been billed for the full tax,” Fishel told The Post.
It got worse when he tried to fix it. When Fishel went to file his exemption, the city’s database claimed one had already been submitted — “likely due to the fact that the mailed notice did not even list the correct names,” according to the filing.
The city Department of Finance sent out 17,000 of these notices, each warning a property owner of a possible five-figure tax bill unless an exemption is filed, under the law approved by state lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul in the spring. As of last week, about 4,290 homeowners had contested their letters. Just 1,906 had been approved.
The new plaintiffs, who claim primary homes in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side, all say they filed for exemptions and have not been granted them. They describe a “tangled morass of an exemption regime” and a “messy, ill-considered, and atextual ‘exemption’ scheme” that has not managed to remove them from a tax list they say they never belonged on. Their estimated bills run between $45,000 and $58,000.
Stephen and Sandra Shore have lived in their Chelsea home for more than 30 years and paid their taxes dutifully, the suit says. The Finance Department’s system rejected their exemption attempts repeatedly, forcing them to send a registered letter “in an attempt to simply submit their application.” Carla Stearns has lived in her Carnegie Hill brownstone, valued by the city at $6.8 million, since buying it with her husband in 2017. She owns no other property. Her letter estimated $55,000 in extra taxes.
“We pay taxes here in the city, and we have for a long time. And the administration of this process has just been horrendous,” Fishel said after testifying at a City Council oversight hearing on the rollout. “They’ve totally botched the process. They really need to withdraw all the notices and start again.”
The new plaintiffs join Staten Island residents Rachel O’Brien and Carmine Morano — the wife and father of City Councilman Frank Morano — and Chelsea resident Simon Hedley. A Staten Island judge granted a temporary pause on the rollout earlier this month; an appellate court overturned it after Mamdani’s administration pushed back. Attorney Randy Mastro told that same judge the new plaintiffs would “eliminate” the city’s “specious mootness arguments,” raised after Hedley — a self-described Mamdani supporter — was granted his exemption.
City Hall did not immediately return a request for comment. A socialist administration that promised to make the rich pay cannot reliably mail a letter to the right apartment.
Source: nypost.com
