Skelos Wants To Bring Back Senate To Approve Tax Relief
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- July
- 10
Senate Majority Dean Skelos signaled today that he hopes to bring back the Senate this summer to approve some sort of property-tax relief program, which would include a tax cap.
Skelos confirmed what has been the growing sentiment among Senate Republicans that they need to pass a new property-tax relief measure before the November elections to save face with voters—even if it doesn’t go anywhere in the Democratic-controlled Assembly.
Republicans hold a tenuous 32-30 seat majority in the Senate.
“I think we’ll hopefully be back in the next few weeks,” Skelos said on Fred Dicker’s Albany radio show this morning. “But we have to look at a total real property-tax relief program, which has to include mandate relief to school districts and other types of ways to get property taxes down.
“I think a cap can be part of that solution, but we have to go even further. People want to do their property taxes reduced. They just don’t want to see an automatic 4 percent increase every year.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno was reluctant to pass Gov. David Paterson’s property-tax cap proposal for fear of retaliation by powerful teachers’ union who oppose a cap. He sought a two-year sunset of the cap, which was rejected by Paterson and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan.
But Skelos, some Republicans said, seems more poised to fall in line with Paterson’s plan, if for no other reason than to be able to blame Democrats during the election year for not also endorsing the governor’s cap.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 11:57 am by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
