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Mostly Cloudy Rockville Centre has own notice of claim to collect sales tax revenue from town, county
As 12 villages band together against Nassau County and the Town of Hempstead for, according to them, not fairly sharing sales tax revenue with the villages, Rockville Centre has filed its own notice of claim.
The claim is separate from a notice of claim filed by Freeport Mayor Robert Kennedy on July 31, which includes Freeport and 11 other villages — Atlantic Beach, Bellerose, Cedarhurst, East Rockaway, Hempstead, Hewlett Bay Park, Hewlett Harbor, Lynbrook, South Floral Park, Valley Stream and Woodsburgh. Villages that have not joined the notice of claim include Island Park, Lawrence and Malverne.
“In the event a settlement is agreed between the town, county and villages,” Kennedy said, “I will not include villages that elected to not participate in our legal action.”
Rockville Centre’s village board voted on June 28 to file its own claim against the state, Nassau County and the Town of Hempstead. “Without its own notice of claim, the village would not be able to receive any money damages even if Freeport’s claim were successful,” village spokeswoman Julie Scully wrote to the Herald in an email.
Nassau County is authorized to collect 0.75 percent of state sales tax, and distributes one-third of that to cities and towns in the form of local assistance programs to minimize real property taxes and defray the costs of collecting, transporting, treatment and disposal of solid waste, documents show.
Rockville Centre’s claim, signed on July 2, says that the town is “fraudulently” using the populations of the villages in Nassau County to boost its allocation of funds — one third of county sales tax revenues. It is then putting some of that money toward solid waste disposal, but not providing that service to villages that have their own sanitation department, like Rockville Centre.
Audit reports show that the Town of Hempstead put $14.4 million of $39 million collected from Nassau County one year toward the collection and disposal of solid waste, according to the notice of claim. The village estimated damages in the claim to be more than $1.5 million.
Last August, Kennedy, a past president of the Nassau County Village Officials Association and the current first vice president of the New York Conference of Mayors, helped launch a petition with support from NCVOA that requested equal distribution of sales tax revenue at the beginning of fiscal 2018. Sixty village mayors, including Rockville Centre Mayor Francis X. Murray, signed the petition.
Despite contributing more than $3.5 million in sales taxes in 2016, in 2018, Rockville Centre received back $66,749 in reimbursements from the town and none in 2017. The village receives about $2.72 in state sales-tax revenue for every resident of the village. Meanwhile, the county and town get approximately $49.50.
“Each year millions of dollars in sales tax are collected by merchants in our village,” Murray said in a statement earlier this month. “Be it car sales through our many dealerships or restaurants and other merchants, the sales tax dollars never come back to Rockville Centre to help keep property taxes down and provide necessary services. I believe this is unfair and I am happy to join my fellow mayors in trying to remedy this situation.”
For the last few months, the village of Rockville Centre has supported the charge by Kennedy. The board unanimously voted on July 19 to authorize Murray to sign a letter agreeing to join in Freeport’s claims — and potential litigation — regarding the sales tax issues on the condition that the village would incur no cost for litigation, according to meeting minutes.
Rockville Centre’s board of trustees has not yet voted to file a lawsuit, Scully noted.
“The town has been discussing the villages’ interpretation of the law, and looks forward to resolving the matter amicably,” a spokesman for Town Supervisor Laura Gillen stated in a past email.
Kennedy has criticized County Executive Laura Curran for not keeping a 2017 campaign promise to share a fair portion of sales tax revenue with Nassau County villages. “She has reneged,” Kennedy said.
The Herald was unable to reach Curran or a representative of her office for comment.
