NEW CASTLE – The town intends to seek county approval to remove more than 350 parcels from the Saw Mill Sanitary Sewer District because those hundreds of residential property owners have had to pay sewer taxes despite having septic systems.
Calling it an “unfair, and frankly illegal, tax burden,” Town Supervisor Rob Greenstein said inthat a significant number of residents who pay sewer tax do so despite having septic.
The 359 residential property owners paid an average of $520 in sewer tax, which stays about the same annually, Greenstein said. The lowest was $238; the highest was $2,246.
Taken together, he said, they pay $187,320 annually.
Last year, the town surveyed property owners in the sewer district asking whether their properties have sewer or septic.
“These residents derive absolutely no benefit from the sewer district,” says Greenstein‘s letter this month to County Executive Rob Astorino and Board of Legislators Chairman Mike Kaplowitz.
The proposal will require a vote of the Westchester County Board of Legislators, Greenstein said.
Ned McCormack, spokesman for Astorino, said the county executive‘s office is reviewing the request with several county departments.
Kaplowitz said that over the past 20 years, there have been a number of petitions in the county to opt out of sewer districts. In the 1990s, he said, he was involved in an effort that got thousands of property owners opted out in Cortlandt, and in the 2000s, some 350 homeowners in Croton-on-Hudson.
“I‘ve always been supportive of the efforts to try to get some fairness to these homeowners,” Kaplowitz said.
These days, the board of legislators almost every month considers one or two homeowners seeking to exit or enter a sewer district, but larger petitions such as the one New Castle intends aren‘t as frequent.
An application to opt out of a sewer district, according to Greenstein, requires that a property be 40,000 square feet or larger, be more than 100 feet from a sewer line and have no septic-failure history. The more than 350 parcels meet those requirements, the town asserts.
Once the county legislators get a town‘s petition, Kaplowitz said, it‘s referred to departments such as the county Department of Environmental Facilities and the Health Department. Eventually, legislation would be sent to the county executive‘s office for consideration, then to the county legislators.
Legislators tend to approve petitions to opt out of sewer districts once they‘ve gone through the departments‘ reviews, Kaplowitz said. But he noted the health department, in its reviews of large-scale proposals, has refused permission to some individual parcels within those applications.
One of 13 sewer districts in Westchester County, the Saw Mill district spans several communities, including part of Yonkers, parts of Pleasantville, New Castle and Mount Kisco.
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/westchester/new-castle/2017/11/01/new-castle-sewer-tax/806056001/