Residents of one Long Island town are fuming after learning they were being slapped with a sneaky spike on their property tax bills — since the suburb owes millions to a local luxury golf course.
The town of Riverhead is leaving taxpayers on the hook for over $7 million in refunds — roughly $6 million of which stem from a lawsuit the town lost after a shoddy tax assessment of the Friar’s Head golf course, residents and sources confirmed.
Some homeowners said they were left shell-shocked after noticing a roughly 160% hike in the “New York State Real Property Tax Law” line on their property taxes with no warning from town officials.
“We shouldn’t have to suffer because of decisions made by a government agency — I mean, someone else misbehaves and I’m the one who gets punished?” resident Robert Olivella, whose home is adjacent to the golf course, told The Post.
One resident said they saw their bill shoot up hundreds, from about $150 last year on that line to now over $400.
“There was no notice, no warning, nothing — it feels almost like they said ‘oh, we better not tell them. Maybe no one will notice,” another resident, who only identified as Steve, said.
But many locals did notice — and are vowing to take their fight to the town board’s next meeting.
“It’s unacceptable,” Olivella, who just moved with his wife from South Carolina, groused.
“It isn’t supposed to be like this, we’re supposed to have open transparency,” he said, adding that had he known the taxes were going to jump he may have purchased a cheaper home.
The unexplained tax hike is the result of a longstanding feud between Riverhead and the luxury golf club — which first challenged the town’s sky-high assessment of its 350-acre property in 2008, according to county and town sources.
Friar’s Head accused the town of overvaluing the club by between $28 and $34 million from 2008 to 2015, according to court documents.
A Suffolk County judge agreed with the club in 2019, ruling Riverhead had botched the valuation by factoring in the potential for residential development on roughly 85 vacant acres of club property — and cut those appraisals by roughly 60% to about $10 to $11 million, court papers said.
“It would be unfair to tax a property for a value that it does not have,” Justice John Leo wrote in his decision.
Riverhead appealed the decision in 2024 and lost again — but by then the tax refund had ballooned to almost $4.5 million plus an extra $1.6 million in accrued interest.
And under Suffolk County’s current municipal framework, those refunds get passed on to the taxpayers.
The massive hike comes as Riverhead’s taxpayers also saw an almost 7% tax rate increase, marking the fourth consecutive year the town board voted to pierce the state’s tax cap.
“Everything’s more expensive and now we got an increase in our taxes, again, because of what [the government] did — it’s unfair — they’re f–ing us,” Olivella said.
