Islip Opens the Door to a 2027 Levy Above the Cap, and Resets What Business Property Carries

The Islip Town Board holds its discussion session at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 15, and two items on the agenda shape what a business property in the town pays next year before a single budget number has been published.

Item 11 authorizes the town clerk to advertise a public hearing on a local law that would let the town's budget officer, the town comptroller, prepare and submit a tentative 2027 budget with a property tax levy above the limit in section 3-c of the state General Municipal Law. Item 24 approves the base proportions for homestead and non-homestead property for the 2026 to 2027 assessment year. The first decides how large the town's total tax can be. The second decides how much of it lands on commercial property.

A hearing, not yet a vote

Tuesday's resolution adopts nothing. It schedules a hearing. The local law comes afterward, and state law requires 60 percent of the board's total voting power to pass it, which on Islip's five member board means three votes. Towns across New York adopt these laws routinely so the final budget has room if it needs it, and some never use the room.

The resolution gives its reasoning in a single clause: the board has determined that it may be necessary to exceed the limit. The cap restricts growth in the total levy to 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower, with adjustments for growth in the tax base and certain pension costs. It does not cap any individual bill.

For scale, the Town of Islip levy was about $147.4 million for the fiscal year ending in 2025, up from about $141.5 million the year before, according to the property tax levy figures New York State publishes for every municipality.

Why Islip taxes business property separately

On September 7, 1982, the Islip Town Board adopted the homestead option under Article 19 of the state Real Property Tax Law. That splits taxable property into two classes. The homestead class is residential: one to three family homes, residential condominiums and similar dwellings. The non-homestead class is the rest, from storefronts and offices to industrial buildings.

Each class carries a fixed share of the levy, called its base proportion, and each class gets its own tax rate, set so that it raises exactly that share. The shares are recalculated every year to reflect new construction and demolition, changes in exemptions and parcels that move from one class to the other. State law limits how far the shift can go: a class's current base proportion may not exceed its adjusted proportion from the year before by more than 1 percent. Item 24 approves this year's figures from the Article 19 report on file with the town clerk and directs the clerk to certify them to the state Department of Taxation and Finance.

The resolution itself does not print the ratios. They are in that report, which is a public record at Town Hall.

What comes next

Under state Town Law the budget officer files the tentative budget with the town clerk by September 30, and the board has until November 20 to adopt a final budget. The hearing on the override law, once it is advertised, falls inside that window, and it is the one public moment to argue about whether the town needs the extra room at all.

What it means for members

If you own commercial property in Islip, or lease space in Bay Shore, Brentwood, Central Islip or the Islip side of Hauppauge on terms that pass real estate taxes through, request the Article 19 report from the town clerk now. The non-homestead share in it tells you whether your class is carrying more of the town levy than last year, before anyone has argued about the size of that levy.

Put September 30 on your calendar. The tentative budget is the first real number, and the override hearing is where a business owner can ask, on the record, whether the town needs to exceed the cap. Once the local law is adopted, the ceiling is gone for the year.

If you are building a 2027 occupancy budget, do not model the town line at the cap. Model it at what the tentative budget shows, and treat the class share as a second variable, because it can move by up to 1 percent on its own even in a year when the levy stays flat.