Debunking The Latest Round of Disinformation From State Senator Skoufis
The local mouthpiece for the real estate industry, State Senator James Skoufis, won't support legislation to preserve land in Orange County despite the ongoing climate emergency.
I know. I know.
It’s likely, barring a write-in campaign, that Orange County’s state Senator James Skoufis will be re-elected.
This is a mixed-bag for everyone in New York’s 42nd District.
On one hand, our temperamental elected official can be a useful mammal.
On the other hand, his litany of sketchy donations from hanhallah and the real estate industry should be enough to disqualify him from seeking office.
If I were a betting man, I’d say Mr. Skoufis is going to get a primary challenge next time around.
But that’s the future. Let’s talk about now.
Right now, readers of The Monroe Gazette are emailing Senator Skoufis and asking him to introduce legislation to allow municipalities in Orange County the option to create a tax on real estate sales that would explicitly fund preservation.
Now, I need to stress the key word here: OPTION.
Nobody is asking him to create legislation that would create a new tax.
Nobody is asking for an imaginary tax that would be used to block or prevent anyone from moving into the community.
In fact, it’s worth reminding the Senator, and people claiming that the tax is meant to prevent people from moving here, that many people move to Orange County for its natural beauty.
Preservation, in the end, is a bigger economic driver than anything that’s lost by an additional tax on closing costs.
We should work to preserve that beauty for everyone’s benefit.
Not to mention, the planet is literally on fire and, despite popular belief in Orange County, you can’t keep pulling water out of the ground expected it to be there for you in perpetuity.
In fact, there’s already a shortage.
What readers of the Gazette are asking for is that Orange County, like some of its neighbor counties, has the same option as those other counties to implement such a tax if the people want it.
IF the people want it, they would need to put it to a vote in their local municipality.
Denying taxpaying residents of Orange County the same OPTION granted to neighboring counties is un-American.
It’s undemocratic.
It’s the same kind of cartoonish overreach a lot of people on the Far Right often complain about it when it comes to the government.
Except this time? They’d be right. The government is trying to tell you what land you can and can’t preserve.
New York State is literally saying, “If you live in Orange County, you’re not allowed to protect and preserve its natural beauty, even if you want to do so.”
This is a denial of every residents 14th Amendment right to due process under the law in order to explicitly benefit corporations and the wealthy.
There is no coherent or logical reason to deny New York State residents their right to vote on whatever they damn well please. Including a potential tax used explicitly to preserve land.
But since the Senator wants to hide behind “the taxes” like something out of The Simpsons, we should talk about it.
There’s a lot to debunk from Senator Skoufis’s memo. So today we’ll just start with this claim:
Thank you for reaching out to me - I hear your concerns. In recent years, several local municipalities have approached my office to request locality-specific legislation that would authorize a new real estate transfer tax for the purpose of funding a purchase of development rights (PDR) program. While I have long supported efforts to preserve open space, including via PDR programs, the choice to fund a program via a real estate transfer tax, given the fact New York State already has the highest closing costs in the country, is problematic. At a time when housing costs are skyrocketing and rates of out-migration are at record highs, enacting legislation that would make living in Orange County even more cost-prohibitive is troublesome. Additionally, studies have repeatedly demonstrated that, for every $1 added at closing, a $1 devaluation in a home’s value occurs. (Emphasis Added.)
There’s some other misinformation above. If you can find the line written by the New York State Realtors Association, I’ll send you a gold star sticker. If you can’t find it, don’t worry, we’ll revisit it in an upcoming post.
Right now, I want to focus on that last line about the studies.
Skoufis is citing a 2012 Study that examined what a PDR caused in Toronto.
There’s a few things to point out about this study though:
It was done in Canada.
It was done in Toronto, one of North America’s largest cities.
It was done in Canada
It was done in 2012, when much of the world’s economy was crawling out of the Great Recession.
It was done in Canada
Oh, right. And it was also done in an urban environment where there wasn’t many other factors determine where someone would choose to live or not.
Of course cost is a factor. But if you’re moving to a Toronto, it’s a much larger factor than it would be if you were looking to move to rural Orange County. People come here for the scenery. That doesn’t mean they don’t think about price. Everyone does. But it’s not THE factor, nor does it devalue the value of anyone’s home. Just ask the people living in Warwick about their property value.
I highly doubt anyone in Warwick is going to say to you, with a straight face, that their home values have been harmed by this small tax that explicitly funds land preservation.
Warwick is the only municipality in Orange County — itself further evidence that New York State is denying the rest of the county its due process — with a PDR, and by all accounts, the program has been a resounding success.
Down on Long Island, still very different from Orange County but a much closer analog than fucking Toronto, a much more recent study found that “proximity to parks and open space enhances the value of residential properties-an aggregate, one-time increase of $5.8 billion. Increased tax revenues from these properties generate $58.2 million annually.” (Emphasis added.)
So, listen. Chris Eachus and James Skoufis are going to hide behind taxes for their reason not to introduce simple legislation that gives your town the ability to vote on an issue.
All because Skoufis is deep in the pocket of real estate companies (much like the rest of the New York State Democrats), and Eachus is just going to follow Skoufis’s orders.
Prove me wrong, Mr. Assemblyman.
We’ll be back tomorrow to examine even more of the Senator’s BS. But I encourage you all to write him and tell him that hiding behind taxation is not going to save his ass on this issue.