Droppings from geese leave wealthy tax activist pooped

Billionaire Tom Golisano says he tried stringing up fishing line, spraying smelly repellent and even posting a wolf decoy, but nothing could rid his lakeside vacation home of the Canada geese that turned his lawn into a minefield of droppings.

His next line of attack? Refusing to pay his $90,000 school tax bill until officials in the Finger Lakes town of South Bristol, N.Y., found a way to control the birds.

“This past summer it was horrible. We’d drive in and find 100 to 200 geese parked on our lawn,” said Golisano, founder of payroll company Paychex and former owner of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team. “You can’t walk barefoot, can’t play Frisbee, can’t have your grandchildren run around. Here I am paying all this money in taxes and I can’t use my property because of the geese droppings.”

Golisano’s stand over bird poop is just one part of his one-man protest campaign against a taxation system he believes is flawed and inequitable.

He’s pledging to file a class-action lawsuit on behalf of other upstate homeowners who believe they are being overtaxed. And he recently launched a website, TaxMyPropertyFairly.com, to give taxpayers the tools to challenge their property tax bills.

Golisano contends that tax assessors lack the training, time and expertise to accurately assign property values that determine what share of the local tax collection each homeowner pays.

“A lot of people are suffering significant injustice because of the assessment system,” said Golisano, 76, founding member of the New York Independence Party and three-time candidate for governor.

Escaping high taxes was part of the reason Golisano changed his permanent home address to Naples, Fla., nearly a decade ago. In 2010, he spent $200,000 in legal fees to get the property taxes on his home in Mendon, near Rochester, reduced from $200,000 to $60,000. He said western New York is notorious for high property taxes. While his wife, tennis Hall of Famer Monica Seles, pays about $4,000 a year in taxes on her New York City condo assessed at $800,000, Golisano said a home with that assessed value in Rochester-area Monroe County would have a $28,000 tax bill.