Justice Cynthia Kern
The court questioned if New York City should be able to take advantage of a clear misclassification of a property thus causing it to have a permanently higher assessed value that could not be challenged. The court answered in the negative, noting if such were the case the city would always have the incentive to “either negligently or intentionally misclassify” properties to maintain a permanently higher assessment. JAM Enterprise sued for a declaration that respondents, including the Tax Commission, erroneously misclassified certain property since 2001/2002 causing the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 assessment to not be in accordance with the statutory limitations. Respondents argued the motion was untimely, but the court disagreed, finding such argument meritless as JAM was not seeking to change the assessment value for the years 2001/2002 through 2009/2010, but to reassess the value during those years to properly assess the value for the tax years at issue. The court granted JAM’s motion for summary judgment seeing a declaration that respondents erroneously misclassified the property and the subject tax year assessments were not in accordance with Real Property Tax Law §1805(2).
