NYS legislature proposes tax rate dilemma solution.

Last week, the New York State legislature jumped into New York City's tax rate dilemma with its own proposals to keep Class II rates from jumping sky high.

The Assembly's solution, rejecting versions submitted by both the New York City Council and the Mayor, as well as scenarios using

the SBEA numbers, was to pass a bill that reduced the amount a class share could rise from 5 percent to 2.5 percent, and limited decreases to 12.5 percent. The Senate had a bill that would raise the class share a maximum of 2 percent and removed the 12.5 decrease. The Assembly, at deadline, had introduced another bill to match the Senate's. Those tax rates would be as follows: Class I 10.888; Class II 9.913; Class III 12.795; Class IV 10.697.

The problem arose when the Senate Board of Equalization and Assessment conducted its tri-annual market value survey, which found Class II's tax share would have to rise 8.5 percent. State law - the only one that the assembly has tinkered with - limits class share rises to 5 percent per year so the remainder would have to be spread across the other shares. Even 5 percent, however, would have driven Class II's tax rate up by 31 cents from its current 9.885 per hundred dollars of assessment, so the action at the Assembly was to limit this rise even further.

Joe Dunne, a spokesperson for the Department of Finance, said tax bills would be printed at last year's rate on July 1 should no tax fixing resolution be adopted by that time by the City Council, which must wait for the legislature.

Total billable assessments for the fiscal year 1993 equal $79.4 billion. Class I final billables equaled $8.8 billion, which was a decrease of approximately .75 percent. The final billable assess valuation for class II was $24.6 billion, an increase from last year of 4.24 percent. Mush of those increases were in physical changes such as new construction. If the Assembly's "cap" was put on before those increases, the rate would have gone down a little bit, said on source. Class III fell by 13 percent to $4.3 billion while Class IV rose just over 1 percent to $4.17 billion.