A Thuggish Tax Grab

Gov. Cuomo is pushing hard to give the MTA the right to grab some of the city’s property-tax take — as thuggish an assault on home rule as New York has seen in living memory.

The scheme would let the Transit Authority declare a “transportation-improvement district” within a mile of one of its projects and collect up to three quarters of the area’s subsequent increase in property-tax payments — all without the City Council’s OK.

This “value capture” tool has its place: Mayor Mike Bloomberg used it to get the No. 7 train extended to Hudson Yards. But that involved capturing taxes from an area that had been utterly undeveloped and wouldn’t have much appeal without masstransit access. And, again, that was a city-MTA agreement. In that light, the city has already committed $600 million in value-capture funds to the MTA’s capital plan.

However much Cuomo wants cash to fund work on a transit system he’d neglected until last year, simply grabbing it is utterly wrong.

Plus, as Nicole Gelinas and Carl Weisbrod noted in Monday’s Post, using this tool as a sledgehammer causes huge injustices.

Notably, the gov wants to grab tax payments from the Grand Central area to help pay for the insanely over-budget $10.2 billion East Side Access project. Huh? The biggest benefits from that flow to Long Island — yet Cuomo isn’t looking to grab tax revenues there.

Gelinas and Weisbrod also showed that, Cuomo’s version of value-capture is also likely to take far more than any MTA fair share of the tax take — and so is likely to force up the city’s property-tax rates. No, no, no, no. It’s the Legislature’s clear duty to nix this madness.