LOCKPORT – The city is in the market for a part-time assessor after Joseph Macaluso said Thursday he is retiring, effective March 28.
Macaluso, a Batavia resident who is retired from the state Office of Real Property Services, took over the city assessor’s office in April 2009 and has generally worked two days a week. His salary this year was to have been $20,607.
“We’re not going back to a full-time assessor,” Mayor Michael W. Tucker said. “We’ve proven we can run without a full-time assessor.”
Macaluso said he will be 62 on April 3 and has applied for Social Security benefits, which limits the amount of money he can earn without penalty to about $14,500 a year. “I am going to work part time at the Batavia Country Club,” he said. This summer, he will be doing the bookkeeping. “I figure turning 62, it was a good time to say, ‘That’s enough,’ ” Macaluso said. “We are planning on a 2014 update, so the city needs to look forward.”
In 2011, Macaluso presided over the city’s first full-scale reassessment in a decade and placed the city on a three-year schedule of citywide revaluations.
The reassessment was done with the help of a consulting firm, but Tucker said the city is required to name someone as assessor to meet the legal requirement of signing the annual tax roll. He said the city could hire a company to perform much of the work, because the city negotiated the assessor title out of the department head union several years ago.
Tucker said it doesn’t look like the city will be able to make a deal to share an assessor with another municipality, as Wilson and Niagara Falls do. He said he talked to Town of Lockport Supervisor Marc R. Smith about sharing, but it doesn’t seem like the timing is right. “I’ve always hoped to share assessment services with the Town of Lockport. Their assessor out there [Jill Lederhouse] is relatively new,” he said.
Lederhouse was hired in December 2011 after having served as acting assessor since March 2011 and deputy assessor before that. Tucker said he had hoped to share the services of her predecessor, John E. Shoemaker, but when he left the town to become Niagara County real property services director, the plan was sunk.
email: tprohaska@buffnews.com
Macaluso, a Batavia resident who is retired from the state Office of Real Property Services, took over the city assessor’s office in April 2009 and has generally worked two days a week. His salary this year was to have been $20,607.
“We’re not going back to a full-time assessor,” Mayor Michael W. Tucker said. “We’ve proven we can run without a full-time assessor.”
Macaluso said he will be 62 on April 3 and has applied for Social Security benefits, which limits the amount of money he can earn without penalty to about $14,500 a year. “I am going to work part time at the Batavia Country Club,” he said. This summer, he will be doing the bookkeeping. “I figure turning 62, it was a good time to say, ‘That’s enough,’ ” Macaluso said. “We are planning on a 2014 update, so the city needs to look forward.”
In 2011, Macaluso presided over the city’s first full-scale reassessment in a decade and placed the city on a three-year schedule of citywide revaluations.
The reassessment was done with the help of a consulting firm, but Tucker said the city is required to name someone as assessor to meet the legal requirement of signing the annual tax roll. He said the city could hire a company to perform much of the work, because the city negotiated the assessor title out of the department head union several years ago.
Tucker said it doesn’t look like the city will be able to make a deal to share an assessor with another municipality, as Wilson and Niagara Falls do. He said he talked to Town of Lockport Supervisor Marc R. Smith about sharing, but it doesn’t seem like the timing is right. “I’ve always hoped to share assessment services with the Town of Lockport. Their assessor out there [Jill Lederhouse] is relatively new,” he said.
Lederhouse was hired in December 2011 after having served as acting assessor since March 2011 and deputy assessor before that. Tucker said he had hoped to share the services of her predecessor, John E. Shoemaker, but when he left the town to become Niagara County real property services director, the plan was sunk.
email: tprohaska@buffnews.com