PumpkinSky

Many not-for-profits are exempt from water charges, if the city has a current certification of their social mission on record.

The de Blasio administration has given a new grace period to more than 200 not-for-profit organizations with tax debts that the city is planning to sell to private collectors.

The city regularly sells liens against overdue property taxes and water fees, banking the lien’s sales price in the city’s coffers and letting outside entities take on the tax of collecting the debt. Those entities can tack on significant fees in doing so.

The lien sale process requires the city to inform lien-sale targets 90, 60 and 30 days before the sale occurs. On its 30-day list for the current round of lien sales released in April, nearly 400 not-for-profit organizations were listed.

Legally recognized not-for-profits are exempt from property taxes and many also are spared water fees, so long as they are actively performing their social mission. In 2012, the city began requiring not-for-profits to apply annually for an exemption that previously renewed automatically, but some entities have not kept up with that change.

Dozens of not-for-profits listed in April have already been removed from the list. But among those still under pressure are more than 100 that recertified their not-for-profit status in the last two years.

In a Thursday email, the City Council’s Finance Division announced that the city’s Department of Finance had extended the lien sale deadline for not-for-profits until June 23. The note instructed councilmembers to contact affected entities in their district and instruct them to apply for an exemption, ideally in person.

According to Paul Segal of the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project, the deadline extension grew out of a meeting last week involving her organization, the mayor’s Community Affairs Unit and representatives of the state attorney general, the entity with direct responsibility for regulating not-for-profit entities.

“This is great news – particularly the extended deadline and the assurance that if an organization submits a new property tax exemption now, DOF will pull the property from this year’s lien sale,” Segal tells City Limits. “We are working together with the administration to improve the process further by making sure that organizations are told that exemptions start they day they get their properties under state law, not the day that Department of Finance grants them. This will make sure that our community institutions get the refunds they are entitled to for tax payments they made in past years simply to stay out of the lien sale.”

Segal adds: “These changes go long way but still do not account for organizations that are currently appealing exemption denials and are headed to the lien sale.”

Neither the office of the attorney general nor the Department of Finance responded to requests for comment.

A list of the not-for-profit entities on the current lien-sale list is below.