A Slap For Home Rule
On Friday Governor Pataki vetoed a bill that would have allowed the people of East Hampton Town to vote for themselves on whether to impose a 2-percent tax on higher-priced real estate sales. The tax would have raised $20 million over a 10-year period to preserve farmland and open spaces, its supporters estimated.
No one asked the Governor to endorse the tax itself, only to allow those who would profit by it - and pay for it - to decide if they liked the idea. We won't get that chance this year. Too bad.
In his veto message, Mr. Pataki mentions not the state real estate and construction industries that lobbied so diligently against the transfer tax, but those who actually work the land. The bill, he wrote, "inexplicably lacks provisions for the protection of farmers."
Not so inexplicably. The Ways and Means Committee asked that an exemption for farmers be omitted before the legislation was approved in the Assembly. It was the Governor himself who failed to sign a last-minute exemption for farmers that Senator Kenneth LaValle had tried to restore with a "message of necessity" in the State Senate.
Local farmers supported the bill with the understanding that an exemption could be worked out after the November referendum. Following its longstanding policy against any transfer tax on real estate whatsoever, the State Farm Bureau, 27,000 members strong, issued a letter opposing the bill. Had the exemption stood, the Long Island Farm Bureau, 5,000 strong, was willing to stay silent on the matter, however.
As the Farm Bureau recognized, the issue was a local one, the bill a local one. The decision to have a referendum should have been a local one, too. It could not have come at a better time, coinciding as it did with the recent cuts in capital gains taxes, which will leave property sellers with more money in their pockets than expected. Even members of the East Hampton real estate industry favored the tax.
Two cents on the dollar when the price of a house creeps over $250,000 or the cost of land goes over $100,000 is little to ask for the great returns all of us, both longtime residents and new settlers, can enjoy when the last best places are saved. Thankfully, East Hampton Town voters have supported preservation measures time and again - and can be expected to do so in the future by whatever means it takes.
The Governor's veto came as a surprise; not until the final day was there any indication that he would not give it his support. He alone bears responsibility for this slap in the face to home rule.