Town of Pelham Assessor Joe Battaglia in his office

In a rare show of public disagreement among local officials, Town of Pelham Assessor Joe Battaglia has objected to the Village of Pelham Board of Trustees’ explanation that its new tax hike, which will increase most homeowners’ property taxes by some 10.4 percent, is the result of a 6.2 percent increase in the tax rate combined with a 4 percent increase in overall property values last year.

“The annual market increases or decreases in assessments have zero impact on taxes,” Battaglia told the Examiner in an email. Any suggestion that a portion of the village’s tax hike stems from an overall increase in assessed values reflects “a fundamental misunderstanding of the assessment/tax process,” he added.

At issue is a chart provided by the village to the Pelham Examiner last month, which broke down the 10.4 percent tax increase into two distinct parts: a 6.2 percent jump in the tax rate per $1,000 in home value, and a 4 percent increase in the overall assessed value of residential homes in the village.

Battaglia took issue with the chart insofar as it appears to shift some of the blame for a double-digit tax increase away from the village and onto the general upward slope of property values in town. Even at 6.2 percent, the village’s tax rate was more than twice the level of the state tax cap, which required the trustees to approve a law allowing any increase over 2.58 percent.

“The implication is that an increase in assessments is a significant part of the tax increases,” Battaglia said in an interview. 

Two years ago, Battaglia wrote an opinion piece in the Examiner on the “Four biggest property tax myths.”  One of those myths, he wrote, was the homeowner’s view that “the higher my assessment, the more money the school/village/town collects.”

“This might be the biggest myth of all,” he wrote. “And it’s really a shame that this is the perception, because it’s demonstrably untrue… Each year, the school/village/town boards determine the total amount of taxes they need to collect in order to provide the services that they provide. This is done entirely independent of assessment information. Your assessment is only used after budgets are already passed to determine your fair share of those taxes.”

Deputy Mayor Mike Carpenter defended the chart shared with the Examiner, noting that it’s similar to the way tax rates and assessments are depicted on the town’s website, where historical comparisons between village taxes owed this year and last year are shown in a box indicating both the tax rate and the assessed values for the given year.

He also pointed to a page on the Village of Pelham’s website that lays out the numbers behind the calculation of the tax rate.

At a Village Board of Trustees meeting last month, Carpenter said there’s a wide variation in the amounts that homeowners will pay and that assessed values are part of the equation.  “If you bought your house recently and that new price is being assessed, that’s a big jump in assessment for most homes that are purchased. That tax bill, compared to last year’s, is going to go up way more than 10 percent because the assessed value is going up. So the assessment’s not driving the taxes, our budget’s driving the taxes…But the calculus in that chart is exactly how the tax bill is going to describe your taxes when you see it: you have your assessed value, you have your tax rate, and you have your real estate taxes.”

Mayor Chance Mullen also weighed in at the meeting, conceding that it’s a difficult challenge to explain how residential tax rates go up each year. 

“Your taxes are the product of the tax rate in any given year, and your home’s value, and every individual property goes up by different amounts,” he said. “So some properties are going to go up by 15 percent. Maybe they did a big renovation… The median property in the village of Pelham went up by 4 percent. So that sort of becomes the basis by which you try to communicate to people…. Some years, the way that looks is property values are going up 10 percent, but the tax rate is dropping by, you know, 3 percent. Most years actually our tax rate drops, right? So it’s a genuine struggle…to try to figure out how you tell people what their bill is going to go up when you don’t know how much their property value has changed.”

Following the formula

In an interview, Battaglia described the tax rate as a “plug” number determined by all of the other factors that go into the calculation of property taxes. 

The first calculation, according to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, is to determine how much money needs to be raised by the municipality, which is the tax levy. 

The tax levy is determined by a formula: Tax levy = budget – revenues.

In the case of the Village of Pelham, the budget for the 2026-27 year is $20.5 million. The revenues the village expects to take in for various services are $5.15 million, leaving a budget gap of $15.35 million. That’s the amount the village has to raise through its tax levy, an 11.2 percent increase over the previous year’s levy of $13.8 million (all figures are rounded). 

The 11.2 percent growth in the gap between the budget and non-property tax revenues collected by the village is the number to watch, Battaglia said.

As for the tax rate, which is usually expressed as “per $1,000 in assessed value,” that’s a lower number.   Tax rate per thousand = (tax levy divided by total of all taxable assessments in jurisdiction) x 1,000.

In the case of the Village of Pelham, the current tax rate according to this formula comes out to 6.9155 per thousand dollars of home valuation, a rise of 6.2 percent over the previous year’s tax rate of 6.5124 per thousand. If the assessed value of all properties did not change over the past year, the village would still need to raise its total tax levy by 11.2 percent, and the tax rate for residential and commercial properties would be closer to that number. But since the assessed value of all properties in the village rose by an average of 4 percent last year–and that number is in the denominator of the above tax rate calculation–the tax rate comes out lower than the 11.2 percent hike in tax collections that the village needs to fill this year’s budget gap.

If there’s confusion now over the effect that an overall increase of 4 percent in assessed values in the village had on taxes, wait until next year.  The town assessor’s office sent out notices last week to all homeowners in Pelham. The overall increase in residential home values soared to 14 percent over the past year, according to the office.

Pelham residents who disagree with their latest assessments can appeal the valuation of their homes at the annual “grievance day,” which is scheduled for Tuesday, June 16.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the Village of Pelham’s chart describing the amount by which taxes for the median home would rise this year, which was 10.4%.  Due to an inputting error, a previous version of the story said the taxes would rise 10.2%. 

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