Yorktown Democratic Ticket Would Provide Competence for Town
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Who are you voting for in Yorktown?
Evidence of the poor performance of the current Town Board is abundant: increased costs from the garbage fiasco; homes flooded from failure to clear town-owned watercourses; failure to rein in out-of-control ATV/dirt bike riders; and failure to put in long-needed sewers.
But there is also a lack of a vision for the future for our town. Other towns are looking for ways to convert vacant commercial space to housing and other uses; the current Town Board is giving tax breaks to developers to build more unneeded commercial space in the business sections of our hamlets. This policy is creating a ghost town of vacant stores and wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. For example, the new CareMount (now called Optum) medical building on Route 118 in Yorktown Heights has cost the town more than $330,000 in lost tax revenue.
More troubling, this bad policy reduces the value of existing space, which means that all commercial property owners can file for reductions in their taxes costing us additional hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. The building on Veterans Road with doctors’ offices and a building on Kear Street with medical and commercial space both recently received reductions in their tax bills. Owners of a wide variety of properties have had their taxes reduced by more than $262,000.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Filing for a tax cert to reduce your taxes is a legal process which can take years. Recently, the Town Board has continued this disastrous policy by offering tax breaks to the developer to add more unneeded commercial space at Underhill Farm.
Development policy should be based on a comprehensive vision of what is needed for our town in the 21st century. I am supporting the Democratic candidates for Town Board in Yorktown, Jann Mirchandani, Tom Marron and Steve Shaw, who will favor taxpayers over developers and restore competence to town government. And I am voting for Diana Quast to continue her excellent service as Town Clerk.
Larry Kilian
Yorktown Heights
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