Letter to the Editor: Peekskill Democrats Passed a New Utility Tax in January 2011

To the Editor:

In "," Jim Knight repeats factual errors made by Peekskill Democratic Party Chairman Marina Ciotti in .

On January 24, 2011, Mayor Mary Foster's administration passed a resolution to impose a 3% City utility tax. The summary of the resolution reads:

"The Common Council for the City of Peekskill believes that the imposition of a utility tax would be a more fair and equitable distribution of the tax burden on the City of Peekskill and is requesting that Senator Gregory R. Ball and Assemblywoman Sandy Galef sponsor a bill in their respective houses to authorize the City of Peekskill to impose utility taxes within its City pursuant to Municipal Home Rule Law Section 40."  You can find the resolution here. 

If Mr. Knight had researched the issue instead of taking Ms. Ciotti's press release at face value, he would have learned things even he did not know.

But both Ciotti and Knight are purposefully obfuscating the issue for partisan political purposes. Their attempt to re-write history by blaming the utilities gross receipts tax on the current leadership of the Peekskill GOP shows just how partisan, and how unfamiliar with basic facts, they both are.  

In 1959, the state Legislature passed General City Law Section 20-b, which authorized cities in New York State to impose a 1% utility tax. This tax appears as a line item in City budgets and audits as “Utilities Gross Receipts Taxes.”  (See, for example, page 47 of 190 of the 2012 Proposed City Budget)

What's significant here is that in January 2011 the Foster Administration invoked a different law, specifically Municipal Home Rule Law, to impose a new utility tax of 3%, something not permissible under current state law.

Further action is required by the Council to impose this tax, but the Council’s intent to create this new tax is indisputable.  And the fact that they created this new tax is important to anyone who cares about cultivating an economic environment in Peekskill that can attract new business and jobs.  Increasing the cost of doing business in Peekskill is not the way to achieve this goal.

And one aspect of the old utility tax is unique to Foster’s administration. Prior to 2008, when Foster became Mayor, the City of Peekskill did not collect utility tax on cell phone usage.  But a Democratic governor passed an executive budget in 2008 that extended General City Law 20-b "to include mobile telecommunications service within the scope of the utility gross receipts tax."

So the cell phone tax is new under Foster. And she's moving forward with a plan to impose a new 3% utility tax.

The "sorry performance" to which Mr. Knight refers is his own, and that of the Peekskill Democratic Party, who are more concerned about making baseless political points than confronting the very real challenges our City faces, most of them the direct result of four years of bad choices and failed leadership by the Foster Administration.

Matt Witchger