Town of Rochester · Ulster County · New York · 2026 Reassessment
The 2026 assessment roll — about to be signed and certified by Rochester's own Town Assessor, Jeremy Baracca — is non-uniform, statistically indefensible, and legally vulnerable. He has the power to stop it.
Critical deadline
May 1, 2026
The date the Assessor files the tentative roll. Once filed, no one can reverse it. The Assessor must act before this date — or every flawed value becomes official town record.
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Everything on this page comes from official documents. The statistics and findings below are drawn directly from the Town's own Assessment Change Array, the 2026 Sales Analysis Report, and the Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) Land Table — all three of which are available to read in full at the bottom of this page. We report what the data shows. You decide what it means.
What's happening
The Town of Rochester hired an outside consultant to conduct a townwide reassessment for 2026 — the process of updating assessed values to reflect current market prices. The goal is legitimate. The execution is not. The preliminary values produced by that consultant show a town where nearly every homeowner faces an assessment that doubled, tripled, or worse — while large institutional landowners holding thousands of acres are in line for cuts, some exceeding 50%.
Until now, the outside consultant has been directing this process. That changes on May 1. That is the date the Town Assessor is scheduled to file the tentative assessment roll — and the moment the Town of Rochester takes full, sole legal ownership of every number in it. Once the Assessor's signature goes on that roll, no contractor shares the responsibility. It belongs entirely to the Town.
New York law is unambiguous: the Town Assessor — not any outside firm — is personally and legally responsible for the accuracy and uniformity of the roll. The Town Board and Supervisor have the authority to stop this before it happens. The window to act closes May 1. After that, individual owners can still grieve their own assessments, but the town government's opportunity to reject the roll and start over is gone.
The smoking gun in the contract
The professional services agreement between the Town of Rochester and GAR Associates LLC — signed on June 13, 2024 by Supervisor Erin Enouen on behalf of the Town and by David M. Barnett, MAI, SRA, on behalf of GAR — is now public. Near the end of the contract, past the billing schedule and the boilerplate, sits a single paragraph that should freeze every official involved in this process:
"Notwithstanding the foregoing, nothing in this Agreement or otherwise shall be construed as a guaranty of the CONTRACTOR's assessment of market value of any parcel of real property covered by this Agreement, it being understood and agreed that the techniques and procedures to be employed hereunder by the CONTRACTOR have been developed for mass appraisal. Any and all guarantees are expressly denied."
— GAR Associates Professional Services Agreement, Section 21 ("No Guaranty"), executed June 13, 2024
Read it again, slowly. The outside firm the Town hired to produce the 2026 values contractually disclaims that what it delivered represents the market value of any property in Rochester. By GAR's own written admission — a document both parties signed — what was handed over to the Town is the output of a mass-appraisal model. Nothing more is promised. Nothing more should be presumed.
Now read the law. Under New York Real Property Tax Law § 305, every value on a tentative assessment roll must reflect a uniform percentage of market value. When Town Assessor Jeremy Baracca signs the tentative roll on May 1, 2026, his signature is a personal, sworn certification that every number on that roll is, in fact, market value.
The contract delivered "computer program output — guarantees expressly denied." The assessor must certify "market value." Closing that gap is not a paperwork exercise. It is a personal legal act that requires the assessor to independently verify, for each parcel, that the computer's output actually reflects what that property would sell for in an arm's-length sale. A signature alone does not make a model output into a market value.
Is this gap unique to Rochester? No. Reassessments across New York routinely follow this pattern: a consultant hands over mass-appraisal deliverables, an assessor signs them, the state counts it as a complete revaluation. The practice is common. That does not make it legally sound, and it does not make it right. It means that towns across New York have signed rolls resting on the same quiet fiction — the contractor's model output, wearing an assessor's certification as market value.
Rochester does not have to follow that script. The May 1 deadline gives the assessor a clean opportunity to do the unusual, correct thing: refuse to certify numbers that the contract itself says were never guaranteed as market values. To sign the roll anyway, with this contract sitting in the Town Clerk's office, is to bridge a real legal gap with nothing more than ink.
Rochester can set a better standard than the state has. Right now, we are on track to match its lowest.
The data tells the story
The Assessment Change Array — one of the three source documents published at the bottom of this page — lists every parcel in the Town of Rochester, ranked by the size of its assessment change. The pattern it reveals is striking: the approximately 30 parcels that received decreases are almost entirely owned by large conservation organizations, a major utility, and government entities. Every other property owner got an increase.
This is not an argument about whether any particular organization deserves a break. It's about what the data shows: the assessment roll treats different types of landowners very differently, and the burden falls almost entirely on ordinary residential property owners.
"I've listened to people with fixed incomes, elderly, lifelong residents — some of which established the town laws that we currently have. They're telling me 400 percent, 800 percent proposed increases. If that doesn't make your heart stop, I don't know what will."
— Rochester resident, speaking at the March 12, 2026 Town Board meeting (Shawangunk Journal, March 17, 2026)
The question is not whether conservation land should be valued differently than residential property — there are legitimate reasons it might be. The question is whether the certified assessment roll can justify, with actual market data, why a homeowner's assessment triples while a major conservation preserve's assessment drops by 79%. That justification has not been provided. New York law requires it.
Six problems with the preliminary roll
These findings come from analysis of the Town's own documents. Each one identifies a specific legal standard, what the data shows, and which law applies. The Town Assessor — as the certified official who signed off on this roll — is legally responsible for each of these issues.
New York law requires every property in a town to be assessed at the same percentage of market value. The preliminary roll shows assessment-to-sale ratios ranging from near zero for some properties to over 11 times the sale price for confirmed vacant land. Confirmed parcels on Heavens Way and Samsonville Road were assessed at 11× their arm's-length sale price. That's not a rounding error — it's a structural failure of the uniformity requirement.
When the Assessment Change Array is broken down by property class, a clear pattern emerges: vacant land parcels (Class 311 and 322) were assessed at 6.6× to 11× their market sale price, while single-family homes (Class 210) were assessed much closer to market. This isn't random — it's a systematic disparity across an entire property class. The effective tax burden on unimproved land became six to eleven times higher than on equivalent residential properties.
The CAMA Land Table — one of the source documents below — contains land values that are the unmistakable output of a computer formula, not human appraisal judgment. In Neighborhood Group 3 (NBHD 44004–44005), the primary residential land rate for parcels up to one-tenth of an acre is listed at $411,109.00 per acre. Real market-derived values look like $400,000 or $425,000. A figure of $411,109.00 is what a regression formula produces when calibrated on insufficient data. The same table shows $83,330 per acre in Neighborhood Group 2 (NBHD 44002–44003) — another non-round figure with no plausible market origin. Neither figure reflects an appraiser's judgment about land value. Both were certified by the Town Assessor as accurate.
These artifacts matter because they reveal that the land value component of every parcel in those neighborhoods — which feeds directly into the final assessed value — was set by formula output, not by analysis of what comparable land in Rochester actually sells for.
The 2026 assessments were produced by a CAMA (Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal) model. CAMA models work by applying neighborhood rate schedules and regression formulas to parcel data — lot size, building square footage, year built, property class. What they do not do is examine individual properties. They cannot account for a structure's actual physical condition, deferred maintenance, water damage, non-conforming layout, functional obsolescence, or the dozens of other factors a trained appraiser weighs in person. The model treats a well-maintained home and a deteriorating one identically, as long as the data fields match.
New York State law and IAAO professional standards both contemplate that mass appraisal tools may assist an assessor — but that the assessor must independently verify that values reflect each property's actual condition. A roll in which fewer than 30 of 4,890 parcels received any decrease — regardless of each property's individual circumstances — is the signature output of a formula applied uniformly. It is not the result of individual appraisal. New York law does not contemplate that a computer program replaces the assessor's judgment about your property's value. The 2026 roll did exactly that.
The IAAO Standard on Ratio Studies requires a minimum of 5 arm's-length sales per property class stratum for any statistical analysis, and recommends 20 or more for reliable Coefficient of Dispersion (COD) and Price-Related Differential (PRD) calculations. A review of the Town of Rochester 2026 Sales Analysis Report — all 196 sales across all 20 pages — reveals that the vast majority of property classes fall far below this threshold:
Class 210 (single-family residential): ~122 sales — the only class with any meaningful coverage. Every other property type in Rochester was calibrated on a handful of sales or fewer:
This means the CAMA model assigned values to farms, commercial properties, mobile homes, seasonal residences, and rural acreage parcels using statistical formulas that had little to no direct market evidence for those property types. The model was essentially a single-family home model applied across an entire diverse rural town.
Under RPTL §§ 500–504, the duty to determine the value of every parcel belongs exclusively and non-delegably to the certified Town Assessor. This duty cannot be outsourced. An assessor may engage a contractor to assist with data collection, neighborhood delineation, and CAMA modeling — but must then independently review those outputs against actual market evidence before certifying any value.
The evidence in the 2026 roll is consistent with a process in which the Town of Rochester and its assessor did not exercise that independent judgment — they accepted and certified a contractor's output wholesale. The algorithmic land value artifacts ($411,109.00/ac), the near-total absence of usable sales data for most property classes, and the mechanical uniformity of a 99%+ increase rate are not the product of individual property review. They are the product of a CAMA model run by a contractor and signed by an assessor who appears to have treated certification as a formality rather than an independent professional act.
The contractor bears no legal responsibility for the values on the certified roll. The Town of Rochester and Jeremy Baracca, Town Assessor, bear it entirely. Deference to a contractor is not a defense — it is the violation.
Using a model or contractor is permitted. Certifying a roll without independent review of the values is not. The assessor who signs the roll owns every number in it — regardless of who produced them.
This is not a one-time event
On December 3, 2025, Supervisor Enouen and Assessor Baracca signed a "Plan for Cyclical Reassessments" and filed it with the New York State Office of Real Property Tax Services. That filing — now part of the public record — commits the Town of Rochester to conducting another full townwide reappraisal in 2029.
The plan is backed by a financial penalty. The Town receives state aid of up to $5 per parcel for completing the reassessment cycle. Roughly 4,890 parcels. Do the math — this is not pocket change. And the two officials who signed the form acknowledged, in writing, that if the 2029 reappraisal is not delivered as promised, Rochester must repay every dollar of state aid received.
An assessment cut today is not a permanent tax cut. It is a single snapshot value produced by a computer model on one particular run, calibrated against a thin handful of recent sales. When the same model is run again in 2029 — against three more years of accumulated sales in a market that only moves one direction in this part of New York — there is no mechanism that says you get the same answer twice.
If the methodology that produced this year's cuts were rigorous, the cuts would be defensible on their merits. The methodology that produced this year's cuts is the methodology documented throughout this page. It is not rigorous. The cut you received this year is as arbitrary as the increase your neighbor received. Both came out of the same CAMA model. Both can flip in three years. Celebrating a short-term discount on a broken scale is not a win — it is a delayed bill.
If your assessment doubled, tripled, or jumped 800% this year, the 2029 cycle does not undo that. It re-runs the same machinery on top of the new baseline. Your 2026 number becomes the starting point for the next round. There is no built-in correction, no automatic revisit. Once certified, these values become the floor.
A flawed methodology, certified once, becomes the foundation for every revaluation that follows. Rochester has now signed a paper that locks in another iteration in 2029 and obligates the Town financially to carry it through. Unless the methodology is fixed before May 1, 2026, the same machine will be turned on again in three years — and every three years after that, for as long as the cycle plan stays in effect.
Some of us are being overtaxed today. On the current trajectory, all of us will be tomorrow. Don't kid yourself.
What residents are asking
A reassessment done right — with accurate data, adequate comparable sales, physical inspections, and a fair appeals process — can be a legitimate tool for tax equity. What was certified for 2026 is not that. The town supervisor and board have no authority to act in the current situation. The legal authority rests with the assessor only.
A path forward — for the assessor
The Assessor is not trapped. New York law gives him independent professional authority to reject a consultant's work product. Here are five specific steps he can take before May 1 to navigate the town and its residents out of this situation — each of which creates a documented, legally defensible record.
Issue a formal written rejection of the contractor's output citing inadequate sales data
The Assessor has independent professional authority to reject a consultant's work product. Draft and file a written determination — before the tentative roll is published — stating that the contractor's CAMA model fails to meet IAAO minimum sample size standards for Rochester's market, that the resulting values are not statistically supportable, and that the Assessor is exercising independent professional judgment under RPTL §§ 500, 501, and 504 to decline adoption. This document becomes the official record justifying the decision and insulates the Assessor from claims of arbitrary action.
Publish the tentative roll using prior-year values updated through existing methodology
The Assessor controls what goes on the tentative roll. File it using the prior methodology with incremental updates rather than the contractor's values. Once the tentative roll is filed on those terms, the contractor's numbers are effectively moot for this assessment year. The burden shifts to anyone challenging the prior values to prove they are non-uniform — a much harder case than challenging a flawed new revaluation.
Demand the contractor's complete deliverables in writing before any implementation decision
Formally request — before the tentative roll deadline — every deliverable specified in the contractor's contract: CAMA calibration reports, neighborhood delineation files, sales ratio studies, model validation statistics including COD and PRD by stratum, and the full list of sales used for calibration. If the contractor cannot produce documentation showing IAAO-compliant sample sizes and acceptable COD statistics, the Assessor has documented professional grounds to reject the output. The written request itself creates a paper trail.
File Form RP-6110 with ORPTS stating no change in LOA
If the Assessor is not implementing the revaluation, notify ORPTS via Form RP-6110 that the Level of Assessment for the upcoming roll is unchanged from the prior year. This formally signals to ORPTS that no reassessment is being implemented, triggers the non-revaluation equalization process, and prevents the Assessor from being caught in a false certification position on the state aid application.
Consult the ORPTS assessor hotline and document the conversation
The ORPTS assessor hotline exists specifically for assessors navigating complex situations. Call it, describe the thin-data problem with the contractor's methodology, and document the guidance received. If ORPTS staff acknowledges the methodology concerns, that conversation — even if informal — becomes part of the record supporting the Assessor's decision. If ORPTS pushes back, the Assessor learns the state's position before the tentative roll is filed rather than after.
Full transparency — read the source material
We believe strongly in transparency. Every statistic and finding on this page is derived from one of these five official documents — the contractor's own deliverables, the official assessment change data, the signed consulting contract, and the Town's filing with New York State. Read them yourself. We have not cherry-picked or manipulated any data.
Where data appeared to support an overassessment claim but turned out to have an innocent explanation — such as new construction on a parcel that previously showed a low land sale price — we removed the claim. The analysis you see here has been verified against public MLS records.
The executed contract between the Town of Rochester and GAR Associates LLC. Section 21 contractually disclaims that any value produced by the consultant represents market value, and explicitly denies all guarantees. Signed by Supervisor Enouen and GAR President David M. Barnett, MAI, SRA.
📄 View PDFForm RP-1573-ACR-P, signed by Supervisor Enouen and Assessor Baracca and filed with the NYS Office of Real Property Tax Services. Commits Rochester to a second full townwide reappraisal in 2029 under penalty of repaying all state aid if not delivered.
📄 View PDFThe statistical study of 196 sales used to calibrate the assessment model for all 4,890 parcels. Source for Findings #1 and #5 — the uniformity analysis and insufficient sample size problem. Contains the raw COD and PRD data.
📄 View PDFThe CAMA model's land value table by neighborhood code. Source for Finding #3 — the non-round per-acre values indicating algorithmic output rather than market-derived appraisal, and the unexplained waterfront rate discount in NBHD 44008.
📄 View PDFAll 4,890 parcels, ranked by dollar change in assessed value. The source for every statistic in the "Who Won, Who Lost" section above — including the institutional decreases, the 99%+ increase rate, and the class-stratified analysis in Findings #2 and #4.
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Key deadlines & what you can do
The Supervisor said on March 12 there is "a lot the board needs to consider." A board member committed to reviewing the contract. Three weeks remain. After the tentative roll is filed, no town official has the legal authority to reverse it. New York State law is explicit on this point: once the roll is certified and filed, the town has no mechanism to rescind it and reinstate prior values. The decision — in every direction — belongs to the weeks before May 1.
⚠ May 1 Is Not Just a Filing Deadline — It Is the Point of No Return
Under New York Real Property Tax Law, the Town Assessor — and only the Town Assessor — has the authority to decide what values go on the tentative roll. That authority exists exclusively before May 1. After the roll is filed, no town official, board, or supervisor can substitute different values or revert to 2025 figures. An ORPTS Opinion of Counsel has confirmed this directly: there is no mechanism in current law for any local officer or governing body to rescind a certified roll.
If Jeremy Baracca files the tentative roll on May 1 without modification, that filing is his personal legal certification that every value in it is accurate, uniform, and supported by adequate market evidence. Silence before May 1 is not neutrality — it is endorsement.
For the Town Supervisor and Board
For Residents and Property Owners
Email the Supervisor and all five board members. State your assessment, cite the data on this page, and demand the Board act before May 1. Contact info below.
Speak at public comment. A room with fifty residents moves officials differently than a room with five. Meeting schedule at townofrochester.ny.gov.
May 26, 2026 — 4th Tuesday of May. Even if you filed an informal review, file this too. It's free and preserves your right to SCAR and Article 7 proceedings.
For large increases, an attorney or assessment rep can help. SCAR is accessible without a lawyer. Article 7 certiorari is available after the final roll is filed July 1.
Many residents — especially older ones without internet access — don't know their rights or this deadline. Print this page. Bring someone to the next board meeting.
Any resident can request the contractor's deliverables and the assessor's review logs from Town Hall — no lawsuit required. The more people asking, the clearer the public record becomes.
A note on tone: We ask that all communications with town officials be kept respectful and factual. These are your neighbors and public servants. Cite the data. State your concern clearly. Angry or threatening messages are counterproductive and undermine the community's case. A calm, well-reasoned letter from a hundred residents is far more powerful than a hostile one from one.
The Town Assessor is the New York State certified official who signed off on the 2026 assessment values. Under state law, the accuracy of the roll is the assessor's personal legal responsibility. Residents can contact the Assessor's office directly to raise concerns about specific assessments or to request records under FOIL.
Under New York State law, the Town Board and Supervisor do not have the legal authority to vote on assessment values or order the Assessor to change the numbers. That power belongs solely to the Town Assessor. What the Board and Supervisor control is the political environment the Assessor operates in. A formal resolution objecting to the contractor's methodology, a funded independent audit, public meetings with large turnouts — all of these change the context in which Jeremy Baracca makes his May 1 decision. Make your voice heard. Contact each member directly. Attend Town Board meetings and speak at public comment. Be specific, factual, and respectful.
Sources and citations