Council’s pied-à-terre hearing produces many grievances, few answers

New York City Council members read out 11 pages of questions over 17 minutes about the city’s pied-à-terre tax rollout at an oversight hearing on Tuesday, probing in detail how Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration came to decide how to notify homeowners about the tax and determine eligibility.

But Council Members Gale Brewer and Linda Lee read the long list of questions to a row of empty chairs in the City Council chambers, as no one from the Mamdani administration showed up to testify. 

“We’re going to send all these questions to the agencies, and boy, do we expect an answer,” Brewer said at a press conference in advance of the hearing. 

The oversight hearing marked a new point of strain in the relationship between the Mamdani administration and the council led by Speaker Julie Menin. Council leaders have actively criticized the rollout of the pied-à-terre tax, a surcharge on high-value second homes passed by the state Legislature earlier this year as part of a deal to generate revenue for the city to close its budget gap. 

The council had hoped to grill Mamdani administration officials about the rollout of the tax, which drew controversy this summer. (The administration published a list – required, they argued – of nearly one million potentially eligible properties and sent notice letters to about 17,000 homeowners stating their properties could be subject to it, to much consternation.)

The administration extended a window to appeal initial determinations of eligibility until Sept. 18. According to City Hall, 9,884 applications for exemptions have been started, 5,001 have been completed and 2,318 have been approved.  

The planned hearing was a perfect opportunity for Menin, who campaigned on holding the Mamdani administration accountable and juicing the body’s oversight function, to do just that. But City Hall’s announcement on Monday that they wouldn’t be attending due to ongoing litigation concerning the tax – something that hasn’t precluded testimony in the past – robbed the council of the chance.

And while neither Mamdani nor Menin was actually at the hearing, it seemed to function at points as a proxy battle between their allies. Dueling press conferences were held at the same time right before the hearing. One featured council members including Brewer, who supports the tax in general, and moderate Democrat and Republican members, who vehemently oppose it, all of whom expressed dismay at the administration’s refusal to testify. A stone’s throw away in City Hall Park, progressive Assembly Members Diana Moreno and Jessica González-Rojas and state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez rallied with organizations aligned with Mamdani, including the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and the New York Working Families Party, to support the tax. “It is good governance to support our mayor, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, when he says he needs this for the city budget,” Gonzalez said. 

“Speaker Menin is inside holding a hearing because she wants to listen to the whining millionaires,” Jasmine Gripper, director of the state Working Families Party, said. “We don’t have time for whining millionaires, we need to take care of our people and our communities.” 

In written testimony submitted to the council, Department of Finance Commissioner Richard Lee said they asked to postpone the hearing until after Aug. 31, the date of the next hearing in the lawsuit over the tax. “The Council declined,” he wrote.

In the end, the hearing primarily featured public testimony and devolved at points into a referendum on the pied-à-terre tax itself, which passed in May as part of the state budget. A cohort, including the Real Estate Board of New York, called for a pause in the tax.

But the hearing also had a strong showing of defenders of the tax. Inwood resident Beverly Solow testified in support of the tax while wearing a “tax the rich” shirt. “It seems reasonable and fair,” she said, while noting that the rollout was messy and hoped that issues with implementing the tax could be resolved. 

At one point, Brewer reminded a group of people testifying in support of the tax that the council – at large, at least – isn’t actually against it. “I want you to know that Council Member Lee and I in particular support this tax,” she said, noting that Menin does too.

Council Member Eric Dinowitz said in the hearing that he also supports the tax, but “without the administration here to even discuss these things on the record in public, it’s very difficult to address these issues in a public forum.”