Judge orders New York City to restart secondary-home tax rollout

(Adds city's appeal in paragraphs 2, 3) By Maria Tsvetkova NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) — A Staten Island judge on Tuesday ordered New York City officials to mail new notices to homeowners it has determined must pay a new tax on secondary homes. The city quickly appealed, invoking a stay that pauses what would have effectively required restarting the rollout of a surcharge on pricey pieds-à-terre. "With a stay, we will continue implementing the surcharge fairly, efficiently and in full compliance with the law, as we have since day one," Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesman for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said in a statement.

The ruling, which sided with a group of homeowners who had sued the city, came a week before the October 6 deadline for homeowners who had been told they owed the tax to prove they should not be subject to the signature initiative of Mamdani's administration. In his ruling, Wayne Ozzi, a state Supreme Court justice in Richmond County, said the steps the New York City department of finance took to begin collecting the tax caused "confusion and dismay" and appeared to result from a rush to fill budget gaps and unfairly put the burden on homeowners to prove properties were their primary residences.

Ozzi cited, for example, the release of what the finance department called a supplemental roll of more than 900,000 properties it said may be subject to the new tax. The city also sent letters to 17,000 homeowners informing them they owed the tax. "No crime is involved here, but homeowners are being substantially harmed and penalized needlessly," Ozzi wrote. The judge ordered the department to remove the supplemental roll from its website, cancel the 17,000 mailings and use the most recently available tax and other information to determine who owes the tax and to draft new, individualized notices to mail out.

The new tax is expected to generate $500 million annually for the city, America's largest. Last month President Donald Trump called the tax a "dangerous political experiment" and said he was looking for legal options for the federal government to reverse it. On Monday, former US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and casino mogul Steve Wynn, who own property in New York City, sued the city over the pied-à-terre tax in a Long Island court, arguing that the tax on secondary homes unconstitutionally discriminates against nonresidents. com)