Mamdani Handed Big Smackdown by Court for His Incompetent Rollout of Pied-A-Terre Tax

We've reported on the horrible mess that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made when trying to impose the new pied-à-terre tax.

His handling of it had a lot of citizens up in arms.

The tax, approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state Legislature, is meant to apply to 1-to-3 family homes worth at least $5 million and co-ops and condominiums valued at $1 million or more that are unoccupied, non-primary residences.

Except then notices went out to thousands of people who didn't fit into those definitions.

Now a judge has smacked down Mamdani for the bungling.

A Staten Island judge on Tuesday dealt a major setback to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy, saying that the city had mishandled the rollout of a tax on high-end second homes and must start over.

The judge, Wayne M. Ozzi of State Supreme Court on Staten Island, sided with a group of homeowners who had sued the city. The homeowners had argued that the Mamdani administration did not try hard enough to determine who should owe the tax before moving toward collecting it.

“Homeowners are being substantially harmed and penalized needlessly” by the city’s “method of implementing the tax law,” Justice Ozzi wrote.

The judge said the city was both “arbitrary” and “capricious” when it mailed notices to several New Yorkers who were not actually meant to be subject to the tax on luxury second homes. 

Some people got notices even if it was their primary home that they had lived in for years, as the lawsuit filed by homeowners against the city pointed out. 

The lawsuit argued that the city had sowed confusion by sending out notices to about 17,000 New Yorkers informing them that their properties could be subject to the tax, without first making sure that the property owners were not full-time residents. The suit also took issue with the city’s publishing an online list of nearly one million “properties that may be subject to the charge” that included the owners’ names.

Justice Ozzi ordered the city to take down the list and replace it with a more limited version that shows only the properties subject to the tax. It also must cancel its previously mailed notices, narrow the list of recipients and send new notices that include detailed information about how the city determined each property that would be subject to the charge.

As RedState reported in August, Justice Ozzi had issued a temporary restraining order to pause the rollout. But the city appealed. 

Randy Mastro, a lawyer who represented the homeowners, said that the city "botched this rollout and should have just admitted the errors and fixed its own mistake" instead of "wasting time and taxpayer dollars" by fighting it in court. 

The city is expected to seek a stay of the judge's decision to continue the rollout.

Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.

Help us continue to report on his radical policies and expose the Democrats who support him. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.