Crowd turns out to prepay taxes
CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. » Town Supervisor Philip Barrett was surprised to see a number of parked cars with engines running in the town’s parking lot last Thursday when he arrived for work at 7:20 a.m.
The surprise wasn’t their presence; he knew they were there to prepay their 2018 property taxes. The surprise was the early hour.
At the final Town Board meeting of the year on Dec. 18, Barrett noted that he had received “a few inquiries” on whether residents would be allowed to prepay part or all of their county property taxes. The requests were in response to the federal tax bill that was on the verge of being passed in Washington.
Barrett said he did some research prior to the meeting and found the town could legally accept payments prior to Jan. 1. All he needed from the county were the warrants and the tax bills. Whether the IRS would accept them was another matter.
Within a week, the federal tax bill passed, and in response, Gov. Andrew Cuomo released an Emergency Executive Order on Dec. 22 authorizing localities to issue warrants for the collection of early tax payments. With the issue of prepayment going at high speed, Barrett announced the town would accept the payments from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Dec. 28 and 29.
Halfmoon Receiver of Taxes Karen Pingelski announced her office would do the same. An early riser, Pingelski was in her office when she looked out at her parking lot at 7:30 last Wednesday and saw the same sight as Barrett.
“It’s been going steady for five hours,” Barrett said shortly after 1 p.m. that day, looking around a packed second floor hallway transformed into a payment room. “When I saw them all out there, I let them all in so they could stay warm.”
The line of residents, all dressed in warm parkas, hoods, gloves and scarfs, wound around the outer walls of several offices. In the middle of it all was Margy Kasky of the town Building and Grounds Department. Kasky was making sure everyone held their place in line and had a number for service, all while reassuring everyone they would be out quickly.
Those wishing to prepay would give their property address to a town employee seated behind a computer, who would provide them a number which they would hand Kasky. She would give the slip of paper to either a volunteer or a town employee tasked with pulling the bill from trays containing 14,000 bills. When the bill was handed to the property owner, they would wait to take a seat before Receiver of Taxes Christine Pagniello and Deputy Receiver of Taxes Rosemary McGuire and write out their check.
Taxes could also be prepaid online using credit card or e-check. The same held true in Halfmoon.
“In 18 years [as supervisor] no one ever asked me to prepay their taxes,” Barrett said. “This is completely new for us. To collect a bill for Saratoga County, you need a tax warrant. We coordinated getting the warrants dated Dec. 21 instead of Dec. 31 so we could do this. The county was very helpful with this.”
Once the town had the warrants and the bills in house, Pagniello said her office still had to go through them all, checking for escrows, where the lender is responsible for tax payments.
“We go through all those to see which of those we have and we put all those together,” she said. “Then we go through all the new homeowners and changed names and update them. I get calls throughout the year and with some of them I have to mail them to Florida. If they’re not es-
crowed anymore there is paperwork to fill out to make sure the bills no longer go to the banks but to the homeowners. Then there are bank changes, where people change banks. That was the majority of the prep work for this.”
All that had to be done between the time the bills were received at town hall on Dec. 21 and when they were made available to homeowners on Dec. 28. Halfmoon received their bills Dec. 22. Pagniello and Pingelski both expect to see a number of duplicate payments made.
The line moved quickly at Clifton Park Town Hall and residents seemed pleased by all the effort.
“My accountant said get down there and pay them,” said Jim Kuhn. “I think they did a great job here. We were here less than 10 minutes.”
Another homeowner, who preferred to remain anonymous, likened all the action to a dispute between President Donald Trump and Cuomo.
“We wanted to decide early on this, so people could plan,” Barrett said. “I knew it’d be a popular move. That’s probably why we got the big turnout.”
At Halfmoon Town Hall, the activity was similar. Lines were shorter, but business was just as steady. Pingelski and Deputy Receiver of Taxes Kiva Cropsey worked seven hours straight, just as Pagniello and McGuire were doing in Clifton Park.
“I had the afternoon off, so I said why not,” said Marianne Geleta. “I’ll go pay my taxes early and hope it saves me money.”
“I had people calling me before the president signed the bill,” Pingelski said. “We have 8,700 tax bills, 2,600 are escrowed and have to be pulled and separated. I’d guess we did 400 today, and we have tomorrow. We’re happy to do it, happy to take care of the residents, but this will be a lot of work for everybody.”