Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Atlantic Beach residents will see an 87 percent jump in their property taxes as the village faces a tax warrant — a notice of unpaid taxes — for $3.746 million. The tax increase, the village’s largest ever, was announced at a special meeting on April 30, which included the adoption of the 2025-26 budget.
The new fiscal plan came in at nearly $245,000 less than the original proposed budget of $5.70 million, which was discussed at the regular board meeting on April 28 but sparked significant pushback from residents after officials revealed a possible significant double digit tax hike. The board postponed the vote in order to revise the spending plan and ultimately settled on a final tax increase of 87 percent.
Mayor George Pappas attributed the steep hike to a tax shift by Nassau County and procedural errors made by previous administrations.
“Following months of research and consultation, we’ve determined that the procedures implemented when the village became an assessing unit were materially incorrect,” Pappas said on April 30. “The inequalities caused by the incorrect procedures implemented by previous administrations were magnified over years as a result of Nassau County not maintaining stable levels of assessment, even though these calculations directly affect the distribution of village taxes.”
The tax rate rose from $2 per $100 of assessed value in 2024 to $3.94 this year, a nearly 87 percent increase.
Pappas, Atlantic Beach’s mayor since 2014, said that the village has been using flawed tax levy allocation data since it became a Nassau County assessing unit in 2005. Nassau County, he explained, provides the tax calculation data used to allocate the village’s tax levy among residential property, apartment buildings, utilities and commercial property.
Pappas claimed that under prior administrations, those calculations were made incorrectly, leading to an unequal tax burden in the property classes.
But former Mayor Stephen Mahler, who led the village from 1996 to 2014, rejected that explanation.
“I heard what he said,” Mahler said. “I have no idea what he was talking about. Now George is trying to blame it on the previous administrations. He’s been in office 10 and a half years — if he thought that during my administration we figured the taxes wrongfully, why didn’t he say so 10 and a half years ago?”
Mahler, along with several residents who spoke at the April 28 meeting, argued that the tax increase stems less from procedural missteps and more from the ongoing legal battle with Chabad of the Beaches, based in Long Beach.
The dispute between Chabad and the village began in 2021, after the Chabad purchased property formerly occupied by a Capital One bank branch at the foot of the Atlantic Beach Bridge.
In 2022, the village attempted to acquire the property through eminent domain, but a federal judge later ruled in favor of the Chabad.
So far, the village has spent more than $300,000 on the legal case, and has allocated $652,668 in the new budget for its village attorney and legal fees.
Trustee Barry Frohlinger agreed with Pappas’s assessment, saying that most of the tax increase was unavoidable due to a county tax shift. He noted that nearly 65 percent of the 87 percent increase is unrelated to the Chabad issue, and is instead the result of the structural shift in how the tax burden is distributed. The remainder, he said, stems from additional village spending.
Frohlinger noted that the board had been aware of a potential 64.8 percent tax hike since his first meeting as a trustee last July.
“The board received this note that taxes were going up 64.8 percent — unrelated to Chabad, unrelated to litigation related to this one issue,” Frohlinger said. “So, in reality, to get the numbers out of this 87 percent increase — 65 percent of that 87 is attributable to this issue, which is not easy to understand. The rest, roughly 20 percent, is attributable to this extra spending.”
Frohlinger added that he and the finance committee worked to cut $243,000 from the budget to prevent the tax increase from exceeding 100 percent.
Atlantic Beach resident Douglas Garczynski was one of many who voiced concern about the village’s direction and frustration over the tax spike.
“You’re not seriously pinning this 87 percent increase on the New York or Nassau County tax rate, are you?” Garczynski said. “You’re telling me that the $750,000 paid in legal fees for the Chabad situation, or the $2 million spent on the Libbey property — part of the 2035 Park Street property tied to the Chabad lawsuit — had nothing to do with the 87 percent? Are you kidding me?”
Have an opinion on the Atlantic Beach tax situation? Send a letter to mberman@liherald.com.
