Clerical error results in incorrect county tax bills

Payment deadline remains unchanged

A clerical error that spread through thousands of Erie County property tax bills has forced these measures:

• New bills have been mailed to some 5,000 Lackawanna property owners who would have been overcharged. Their new bills are emblazoned with blue ink to say “corrected tax bill.” Lackawanna residents should wait for those new bills before paying their taxes.

• Taxpayers overcharged in the other municipalities, Aurora and Elma, are being urged to pay their taxes after confirming the corrected amount with their tax collectors. They will not receive a new bill. Anyone in Aurora, Elma or Lackawanna who has already overpaid will be issued a refund, said Grant Loomis, a spokesman for County Executive Chris Collins.

• County workers over the weekend electronically sent corrected tax rolls to the banks and escrow companies that handle tax payments for their mortgage-holders.

• And workers are scrapping thousands of tax bills that had yet to be distributed to property owners in Erie County’s smaller towns and will print new ones.

Under the county’s tax law, landowners in smaller towns have an extra month each year to pay their taxes without penalty, and their bills had been printed but not yet delivered. Their payments are still due by March 16 without penalty.

Property owners in Erie County’s cities and its larger towns — those with 10,000 people or more — must still pay their taxes by Feb. 17 before penalties accrue.

The county’s error triggered both overcharges and undercharges. While Lackawanna, Elma and Aurora were overcharged, these municipalities were undercharged: Buffalo, the City of Tonawanda and the towns of Alden, Amherst, Cheektowaga, Clarence, Grand Island, Hamburg, Lancaster and Orchard Park.

The taxes for those undercharged communities will be adjusted in 2010, said Joseph Maciejewski, the county’s director of real property tax services, who took responsibility for the mistake.

The clerical error threw off most bills by less than $100 a year, Loomis said, and occurred as the county charged municipalities for a cost related to community-college education. Counties must pay out for their residents who enroll at another county’s community college. County governments can then pass those costs to the municipality where the student resides.

Erie County assesses the charge by adjusting its tax rate for each municipality. But something went wrong as those obligations were entered into a computer program. When one line was missed, the error snowballed.

In Amherst, which was undercharged, Town Comptroller Darlene A. Carroll estimated the county’s taxes will be adjusted upward in 2010 by about $12 a year on a $150,000 home.

County officials said these towns will be unaffected: Boston, Brant, Colden, Collins, Concord, Eden, Evans, Holland, Marilla, Newstead, North Collins, Sardinia — the smaller towns for which incorrect bills had not been distributed.

Tax charges for three towns toward the end of the alphabet — Tonawanda, Wales and West Seneca — were accurate, the county executive’s office said.

Loomis, the county executive’s spokesman, said the problem is not expensive to correct. Maciejewski and most of the workers who toiled through the weekend to address the error can take time off rather than collect overtime pay. The other costs are for the paper and the postage to mail Lackawanna’s bills.

However, the mistake generated confusion among property owners and concern among town tax collectors, who took part in a conference call with Maciejewski on Monday afternoon. The error was spotted Friday by Lackawanna Mayor Norman Polanski, who called County Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz, among others.