Nassau refund topping $1.5M going to Glen Cove, its schools

Nassau County will return more than $1.5 million to Glen Cove and the city's school district as soon as this week to correct more than a decade of miscalculated payments, officials said Monday.

The Glen Cove Industrial Development Agency incorrectly calculated how to divide payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, from 2010 to 2021, according to county and city officials.

PILOTs are a type of subsidy used for economic development that allow beneficiaries to make payments that resemble property taxes for a set period of years but are lower than property taxes.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office discovered the overpayments to Nassau County in a 2021 audit. 

Nassau County Comptroller Elaine Phillips said in an interview her office is returning the overpayments that the Glen Cove IDA "accidentally made."

Under the settlement, the county will refund $778,000 to the city and $805,000 to the school district. 

The money was included as revenue in Glen Cove's 2023 budget even though negotiations with the county over the return of the funds hadn’t been completed. 

“We gave the people a zero percent tax increase because we had great faith that we were going to get it this year,” Glen Cove Mayor Pamela Panzenbeck said in an interview.

The city is using the refund “to fill the tax levy” rather than spend it on new initiatives, she added.

The state comptroller’s office said in its audit of Glen Cove IDA’s operations for 2017 and 2018 that officials hadn’t adjusted the schedules used to allocate PILOT funds as needed when county and local tax rates changed over the years. 

That error has been fixed, according to Panzenbeck. 

“We have been assured that that will never happen again,” Panzenbeck said. “There was a mistake that was made many years ago and it just kept going and going.”

Negotiations with the county over the refund began last year, she said.

Phillips said Glen Cove officials approached her office last year with the overpayment issue.

"We said we need to now go back and do our homework," Phillips added. "A problem was identified, we researched it, we worked together and we resolved it." 

 Phillips said the county's number was lower than the figure officials ultimately agreed upon. 

Glen Cove's calculation for what the city and school district were owed was about $30,000 higher than what was settled upon, Panzenbeck said. 

“They had a number, we had a number and we picked the number in between,” the mayor added.  

Panzenbeck said she and Glen Cove City School District Superintendent Maria Rianna met with Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman in February and Blakeman assured them they would get the refund.

On April 24, the Nassau County Legislature authorized Blakeman to refund the money, according to county officials.