Judge Wayne Ozzi ruled city officials violated property owners’ due process rights by sending tax notices without verifying their primary residences.
Page F3From§Eachthe midnight edition — 30 September 2026
City's tax rollout ruled unconstitutional, appealed same day, called a formality.
As it ran on the front
Staten Island, Tuesday. Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court looked at the pied-à-terre tax rollout and found a filing problem: the Department of Finance sent notices to owners of second homes without first checking whether those homes were, in fact, second homes. Due process, the judge wrote, requires the city verify a fact before taxing on it. The city had not. He ordered the rollout undone and started over.
The city's answer arrived the same day. New York filed an appeal invoking what state law calls the automatic stay, a provision that lets a losing party keep moving while the appeal is pending.…
…(cont) Reconcile the paperwork here, hon. A judge found the underlying verification missing — the step where the city confirms a home is not a primary residence — and the city's response was not to supply the missing verification. It was to file a document that keeps the case moving without it. The gap in the filing is still the gap. The appeal does not fill it; it postpones the question of whether it will ever be filled.
That offer is conditional. Nobody has been paid. The mayor's office is the plaintiff holding that money back, the same office now insisting, in a different courtroom, that a stay lets it keep moving without waiting on anyone to check anything.
Run the two ledgers side by side. One column: a tax on second homes, blocked for skipping verification, kept alive anyway by a filing that requires no verification of its own. Second column: a payment to classroom aides, blocked by the city's own suit, held until a bargaining session that has not happened. In the first column, the missing step gets a stay. In the second, the missing step gets held to a negotiation.
Money finds a way to keep moving when it is owed by New York City to the owners of second homes fighting a tax. It finds a way to stop moving when it is owed by New York City to the people working in front of the classroom. That is not an accusation. That is what this week's docket shows, filed under two different case numbers, on two different tracks, out of the same office.
“This is the shell game, folks: the city can't verify whether a house is really a second home, but it can file an appeal the same day to keep the tax machine running anyway. The checks for teaching assistants sit locked in a lawsuit the mayor's own office filed, waiting on a bargaining session nobody's scheduled. Watch which column moves same-day and which one waits on a negotiation — that tells you whose money this city protects.”
“Look, an automatic stay is standard legal procedure — every city appeals a ruling it disagrees with, that's not extraordinary, that's just how litigation works. It's not like the city is admitting the notices went out recklessly, they're just — okay, they went out without checking primary residence, but that's a paperwork question, not a — actually, forget I called it a formality.”
The receipts
A Staten Island judge sided with a group of homeowners who had sued the city over its introduction of the tax, dealing a blow to Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
A Staten Island judge blocked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s effort to institute a new tax on high-end second homes, telling him to start the effort over. Justice Wayne Ozzi of the state Supreme Court on Staten Island ruled in favor of homeowners who sued the city over the pied-à-terre tax scheme, an annual […]
A Staten Island Judge on Tuesday ruled against New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D) pied-à-terre tax on second homes, arguing the city mishandled the tax’s rollout. Judge Wayne Ozzi, a Democrat on the state’s Supreme Court, wrote in his ruling that Mamdani’s Department of Finance (DOF) violated the plaintiffs’s — a group of NYC...
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office filed an appeal on Tuesday following a Staten Island judge’s ruling that barred notices from being sent to homeowners affected by the pied-à-terre tax. A city official told The Hill the appeal invoked the “auto stay,” which under New York law allows the city to continue with its...
· Menin pressures Mamdani to drop lawsuit blocking $10K payments to NYC teaching assistants from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.