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CAPITOL
Homeowners still have time to apply for STAR tax rebates
BY BOB CONNER Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter Bob Conner at 462-2499 or bconner@dailygazette.net.

   While most property taxpayers have already received their STAR rebate checks, anyone who hasn’t applied for one yet can still do so until the end of the year.
   The previous Nov. 30 application deadline was extended when Gov. Eliot Spitzer signed a bill into law Oct. 31. That bill was one of the few products of a brief late-October special session of the Legislature.
   Thomas Bergin, spokesman for the state Department of Taxation and Finance, said the state has already sent out all the “enhanced STAR” checks to home owners aged 65 and over. Enhanced STAR did not require application forms, because the state already had recipients’ income data.
   This year’s basic STAR does require people to apply for it, and the state mailed out those forms. As of Tuesday, Bergin said, 83 percent of the forms had been returned.
   In Schenectady and Saratoga counties, Bergin said, 89 percent of the forms had come back to the department. In Schenectady County, he said, the state had sent out checks to 23,132 households out of the 30,580 deemed eligible.
   The total cost of the program, Begin said, if all the checks were mailed out to all households the department calculated were eligible, would be $1.3 billion.
   The state has sent out 630,000 enhanced STAR rebates, totaling $206 million. In the basic STAR program, it has so far sent out $717 million to about 1.84 million households of the 2,736,151 deemed eligible. The department budgeted mailing costs at $2 million, but will exceed this amount because it decided to write again to those who had not responded. It just finished mailing out almost 600,000 letters to people who did not return the application previously mailed to them.
   Bergin said the fastest way to get the rebate is to file electronically through the department’s Web site. It takes the state “a couple of weeks” from that point to send out the check, he said, but four five or five weeks to respond to a mailedin application.
   Bergin said if checks or applications are returned by the Postal Service, the department tries to locate the homeowner.
   STAR provides state-subsidized school tax reductions by reducing assessments. This year’s rebates are based on income and local tax rates. A sliding scale reduces benefits for higher-income people, with the maximum annual income cutoff at $250,000.
   Bergin acknowledged some complaints from people who had to wait 10 or 15 minutes to get through on the phone to the department hot line with questions about the program, but said that is no longer a problem.
   The enhanced STAR rebate was reduced during budget negotiations, and in fact pays out less than the basic STAR rebate in most cases. There was support, especially from Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, for increasing the enhanced STAR rebate in post-budget legislation. But with the year slipping away, it appears that proposal has fallen victim to the partisan deep freeze in relations between Bruno and the Democratic governor.  

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The enhanced STAR rebate was reduced during budget negotiations, and in fact pays out less than the basic STAR rebate in most cases. There was support, especially from Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, for increasing the enhanced STAR rebate in post-budget legislation. But with the year slipping away, it appears that proposal has fallen victim to the partisan deep freeze in relations between Bruno and the Democratic governor.