Library to pay $105G In questionable taxes

By Michael Horowitz

BRONX, NEW YORK, JULY 18- The New York Public Library will pay $105,000 in disputed charges for real-estate-tax payments as a condition for a new lease for its space adjacent to the Bartow Avenue Shopping Center.

Library official had previously balked at making these payments, saying that bills for them were not submitted in a timely manner and that the bills weren’t properly documented.

The Baychester Library, which reopened this week, had been closed for a week because its air-conditioning unit wasn’t working.

A spokeswoman for the New York Public Library said, this week, that the library system looked forward to a cooperative relationship with the Riverbay Corporation and the Co-op City community in the years to come.

With the public library paying its real-estate-tax debts, the controversy over commercial real estate taxes for Co-op City and its merchants has yet to be resolved even though the matter was on the front burner of community concerns several months ago.

Management officials have taken pains to avoid the issue in recent months, and so have merchants, some of whom have refused to pay the taxes.

Other merchants have agreed to pay modest increases in taxes, seeming to be relieved that threats of tax increases of up to 1,200 percent, which has been threatened several months ago, were on the back burner for now.

The Baychester Branch of the New York Public Library has been a mainstay in Co-op City since the community’s earliest days.

In the 1970s, the local library, which remains one of the city’s most heavily utilized branch libraries, had been threatened with closing during a budget crunch that brought the city to the edge of bankruptcy.

A major community effort, at that time, played a key role in the decision to keep the local library open.