STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Most New Yorkers could use an extra few hundred dollars ahead of the holiday season, and Gov. Kathy Hochul said this week that she’s hoping to do just that.
During a Tuesday editorial board meeting with Syracuse.com | The Post Standard in upstate New York, the governor told the Advance/SILive’s sister site that she’d asked the state lawmakers to approve a STAR rebate check this year for home-owning taxpayers who make less than $250,000.
About 480,000 New York City households would be eligible to receive $425, and about 2 million households outside the five boroughs would be eligible to receive $970.
Each year, the STAR program, short for “school tax relief,” sends credit checks to home-owning households with incomes under $500,000 to pay school taxes, and people who owned their home before 2015 can still receive an exemption that automatically reduces their school tax bill.
Hochul said her proposed rebated, which would be the largest in state history, would be checks in addition to the existing relief, and would go out in the fall.
Unlike previous programs, this only lasts one year, and taxpayers wouldn’t need to apply for it, according to the report.
Hochul’s proposal also drops a requirement that school districts stay within a tax cap in order for homeowners in that district to qualify.
Upstate, schools are funded through property taxes, but in New York City most of the funding comes from local income taxes.
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