Rye Town Supervisor Joseph Carvin is unhappy with Westchester County”™s high property taxes and overlapping layers of local bureaucracies. So he is on a mission to tackle this problem ”“ even if it means eliminating his town government and his own job.
He said this would be “a good first step in the right direction,” adding he would favor a more far-reaching reform including eliminating the county government.
Carvin is taking the lead in eliminating the town of Rye, which includes the villages of Port Chester and Rye Brook as well as the Rye Neck region in Mamaroneck. He has been the town”™s top elected official for the past three years. Carvin is also an investment professional, serving as a U.S.-based hedge fund manager for Altima Partners, a London-based fund with $1.9 billion in assets.
“The principle reason that we are looking to eliminate the town of Rye is that when we look at the tax dynamic, our view is that it”™s unsustainable,” he said.
“You can”™t continue to hurt our property taxpayers any more than we already have. Westchester County is the highest property-tax county in the nation. So what we are trying to do is fundamentally change the tax dynamic. In order to fundamentally change the tax dynamic, we need to restructure our local government.”
Carvin said the local government hasn”™t changed since the time of the light bulb.
“So there are thousands of overlapping governments and over 300 overlapping governments in Westchester alone. We want to take the lead in restructuring local governments.”
He said there is political support from other municipal officials and from the public for eliminating the town of Rye. And if the town is eliminated, he said, “what would happen would be that (the) villages of Port Chester and Rye Brook would have to be coterminous and develop their own ability to assess property and value homes. Currently, the Rye town government has around 20 employees and a $3.6 million annual budget, with a responsibility for conducting local property assessments. It also maintains several local public properties, including parks, bridges and a municipal court.
He said eliminating the town government would “symbolically eliminate a layer of the government.” But to have a bigger impact, he said what really should happen is a more far-reaching reform including eliminating the villages and then merge the Rye town government with the Rye city government, so that there would be just one level of government rather than four levels of government governing 50,000 people in the town and city. “But there just doesn”™t seem to be much public support for it.”
He also would like to see the elimination of the county government. “Then you can begin to talk about a far-reaching restructuring of local governments ”“ but that”™s more than I think there is support for politically.”
