Former Bloomberg commissioner blasts pied-à-terre tax in lawsuit filed against Mamdani 

You’re guilty until you prove yourself innocent in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York.

Former tax chief Martha Stark — who has been trying to fix tax inequities for almost 40 years — is giving NYC’s mayor a big fat “F” on his new pied-à-terre tax.

Stark, policy director for Tax Equity Now New York (TENNY), and a former finance commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, accused the city of overreaching with its data dump and improperly shifting the burden of proof onto innocent homeowners. 

Stark’s remarks were submitted as expert testimony in a lawsuit brought by three furious homeowners seeking to halt the city’s controversial new luxury second-home tax.

The trio claims City Hall is unfairly forcing them to jump through hoops to prove they actually live in their own homes full-time, all to avoid a luxury tax for second-home owners, according to the lawsuit filed Friday in Staten Island Supreme Court. 

The suit demands that a judge declare the city’s actions illegal and immediately scrub the 900,000-name list from the DOF website, released in July.

“In total, out of approximately 959,710 records published, only 24,218 — roughly two and one-half percent — meet the statutory value threshold,” which taxes one- to three-family homes with market value of $5 million or more; and condominium and cooperative apartments valued at $1 million or more, Stark said in expert testimony. 

Release of the names and addresses “caused widespread confusion among property owners who feared they might be liable for the Surcharge when it does not apply to them under the statute.”

The city then mailed warning letters to around 17,000 property owners — 7,218 names short of the homes over the threshold — that were potentially eligible for the tax, but only 5,000 to 6,000 properties actually fit the bill as non-primary residences subject to the tax, she said. 

That left 11,000 to 12,000 homeowners with the burden of establishing that they are not subject to the tax.

Rather than use “opaque and unverified unit-value allocations,” Stark said the city could have used tax returns, STAR exemptions and abatement records to accurately determine primary residences.

Stark has pushed for structural property tax reform in the Big Apple for four decades.

Stark was part of a 2107 group that sued to get the city’s property tax assessment scheme tossed. TENNY claimed the current law and its implementation violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the New York and US constitutions, the state’s Real Property Tax Law and the federal Fair Housing Act.