Why are the Scarsdale Mayor & Trustees Mistreating a Volunteer?

Kudos to the Inquirer for pointing out the refusal of the Village Board to renominate resident volunteer extraordinaire Jane Curley to the Board of Assessment Review ("BAR"). I am a current member of the BAR. This Board of resident volunteers is essentially the "People's Court," and we hear every Scarsdale property owner's property tax grievance. The past two years, we decided over 1,800 grievances. That number represents close to 1/3 of the total number of properties in the Village of Scarsdale.

Our workload is enormous, and we do it over two months in the Summer during the evenings. We do it as volunteers. We do it for free. We take our responsibilities very seriously. We are experts in valuing Scarsdale real estate.

For the past two years, we were very fortunate to have resident Jane Curley join us on the Board. She filled an unexpected vacancy in 2016 caused by the resignation of Dorothy Finger. This was the Summer of the Ryan revaluation nightmare when we had the highest number of grievances in Scarsdale’s history to decide — over 1,100.

Jane knew what she was getting into but jumped in anyway, spending long Summer evenings in Village Hall with us debating the merits of each resident’s grievance. Jane is among the most qualified members we’ve ever had — she’s been a licensed New York State real estate appraiser, a licensed New York State real estate agent, and professionally she works for one of the world’s largest banks, validating its models for financial risk. Plus, she tracks the Scarsdale real estate market closely each week. Jane is hard working, fair, diligent, ethical, knowledgeable, and a delightful colleague. Her term expired on September 30, 2017, as did the term of fellow BAR member Thomas Giordano. Tom was reappointed. Jane was not.

Very importantly, New York State law requires that appointees to the BAR be qualified by being knowledgeable about real estate values in their municipality. That's why most appointees are typically real estate appraisers, agents, real estate lawyers, builders, former assessors, and the like. Jane surely fit that bill, plus she had two years of on the job experience, had decided more than 1,800 cases, and had the full support of her fellow BAR members. She was unceremoniously dumped however, by the Village Trustees.

Trustee Seth Ross, who headed the Personnel Committee, never asked Jane if she wanted to be reappointed. Seth never asked the three remaining BAR members their opinions about Jane's performance. Seth couldn't know about Jane's work on the BAR because all our deliberations are required to be non-public by law. Seth did absolutely no due diligence on Jane because he simply didn't care. He had his own agenda. Instead, Seth selected two new residents, Richard Pinto and Anna Karpman, who each moved to Scarsdale a scant two years ago. These new Scarsdalians have absolutely no real estate backgrounds in their resumes. They are completely unqualified to serve on the BAR. (This is not meant to denigrate their qualifications to serve on many other Village boards and councils that don't have statutory requirements for specific expertise).

That's not just my opinion. All three current members of the BAR sent a letter to the Board of Trustees last week which I read into the record at the Village Board meeting. The submission of such a letter from a sitting board challenging the Trustee’s appointments to a board is unprecedented in my Scarsdale experience.

When I finished reading the BAR letter, the Trustees sat there in stony silence. Jane had sent the Trustees a letter asking why she had not been reappointed. They never had the courtesy to respond. Jane has never been thanked by the Trustees for her outstanding service as a member of the BAR. When asked by the Inquirer why Jane was not reappointed, Seth replied that the Board had a “good reason” but wasn’t at liberty to say. What cowardly innuendo!

During my recent campaign for Village Trustee, I posted signs which proclaimed "Vote for a Leader, Not a Lemming." The signs distressed former Village Trustee William Stern, who suggested in a recent letter to the editor in these pages that I am not "worthy" to serve as a Trustee. Perhaps he is right. When the time came for the vote on the appointments to the BAR at last week's Village Board meeting, prior to the vote there was complete silence. With apologies to Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, I'll call it "Silence of the Lemmings." Only at the actual roll call did the trustees, one by one say "aye," which, for Jane, meant "bye bye." I'm definitely not "worthy" to treat wonderful Village volunteers so woefully.

Robert Berg is a member of the Board of Assessment Review, C0-Chair of the Scarsdale Forum's Property Assessment Committee, and President of the Crane Berkley Neighborhood Association.