County will refund school district, city

CONTINUED FROM FRONT PAGE cated to each jurisdiction. She did not confirm the accuracy of the percentages calculated by the former controllers.

Anne Lamorte and Margo Zoldessy, the IDA’s chief financial officers, and its executive directors, Barbara Peebles and Ann Fangmann said they were unaware they needed to review PILOT allocation percentages to ensure they were receiving the PILOT amounts they were entitled to, based on approved agreements.

The schedules created to determine the PILOT allocations were created by the previous controllers, who never verified the calculations in the language in the actual PILOT agreements to ensure accuracy.

During the audit, Fangmann and Piccirillo found discrepancies in PILOT agreements spanning 10 years.

While reading a PILOT agreement in 2020, Piccirillo noticed the allocation methodology was not how it was being billed.

“They only do testing on a sample basis, the sample period that they were auditing. The amount was much different,” Piccirillo said. “And then what we did at the end of the audit was, we decided, with the administration, and the IDA, to extrapolate it to all active PILOTs as far back as we can go. That’s when we realized that there was a lot more than what the audit had discovered.”

When Glen Cove Mayor Pam Panzenbeck took office, she learned he city had been overpaying its PILOTs to the county, while underpaying its school district, for more than a decade. Panzenbeck and Piccirillo met with Nassau County Comptroller Elaine Phillips to discuss reimbursement.

Panzenbeck met with Maria Rianna, Glen Cove City School District’s superintendent, and Nassau County

Executive Bruce Blakeman in February. Panzenbeck was assured the city and school district would get the refund.

The city’s portion of the refund was preemptively included as revenue in Glen Cove’s 2023 budget. It indicates $565,000 of the refund will be used for the general fund to help flatten tax rates and $235,000 will go toward reducing the city’s current fund balance deficit.

Residents were promised a zero percent tax increase because, Panzenbeck said, she had faith the city would be issued the refund in 2023.

Rianna said that although the money was owed to the school district, the district administration had not preemptively discussed how the funds would be allocated. The funds will be deposited into the district’s general fund, and from there it will go toward any special projects or bill payments, or be put into one of the district’s reserves, she said.

Piccirillo said there is now a process in place in which all invoices that are created are double-checked by him and by Fangmann.