What will be your reaction if in one fine morning you receive a huge tax bill for a building abandoned years back? You will be, without a doubt, stunned and your heart will bleed. The next situation is quite obvious. You will either rush to the concerned governmental authority or to the nearest health center feeling unwell. Well, this is an imagined story. But the same thing is happening now at Buffalo, the second largest city in the state of New York and the preys are the Catholic parishes.
This may appear as quite unusual but is certainly a reality. A lot of Catholic parishes in this principal city of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area and the seat of Erie County are paying property taxes on buildings abandoned long ago. According to the latest available information, five church properties in the city are being taxed. Well, this is certainly not all since four others were recently added to the city’s tax rolls and the bills will be delivered in the coming month of July.
This was certainly unforeseen since the parcels had enjoyed exemption from property taxes on account of their religious purposes for a good time. The only reason, as stated by observers, of this development is that these buildings are no longer being used on religious purposes or by any church and the properties have lost the conventional exemptions hence.
Nevertheless, it should be maintained that the closure of religious buildings is not a bizarre concept and in the past the same things did take place. But it’s quite unusual at this time since never before such a large number of churches were put to tax rolls. It is also set that five empty church buildings in Niagara Falls will be added to the tentative tax roll on May 1.
All these have resulted into utter confusions. Many people consider that Catholic parishes should be exempted from such forms of harassments and just the opposite is taking place now, which is not desirable.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.