The sale of a Blackrock home owned by Bridgeport Mayor Ganim sparked controversy while he ran for reelection last year.
WSHU's Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Andrew Brown to discuss his article written with Katy Golvala, Dave Altimari and José Luis Martínez, "Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim one of the biggest beneficiaries of revaluation in 2021," as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short.
WSHU: Mayor Joe Ganim bought a house in the city's Black Rock neighborhood in 2021 for $333,000 and sold it two years later for $1.1 million. That's quite a profit on a flip. But Ganim also got city tax breaks on the property. Is that what prompted you and your colleagues at the Connecticut Mirror to decide to scrutinize the city's records on this?
AB: So last year, when Mayor Ganim was running for reelection in a hotly contested mayoral race, the Connecticut Post, to give them credit, did several stories about this property, and they did so at the time because the property was selling and people began to at that point to notice several things. The Connecticut Post reported that Ganim reportedly did a bunch of work on the property that was never permitted. The post also previously reported that the house was being marketed as an Airbnb, even though that was against the city ordinances.
When Ganim was running for reelection, his mayoral opponent, John Gomes, and some of his allies began to raise the issue of how low the taxes on this property dropped immediately after the mayor purchased it. They filed several complaints, including with the city's Ethics Commission. So we decided to take a closer look at how this tax decrease happened and how it's stacked up to other properties in Bridgeport.
WSHU: And what did you find?
AB: The major takeaway from this story is that in 2020, in early 2021, the city was going through what's called a revaluation where they revalue, for taxing purposes, every piece of property in the city. When Ganim purchased this 7,000-square-foot house in January 2021, he immediately asked for a further reduction from his city's tax department. He requested, through his brother, who is an attorney, a 45% cut to the assessment that was going to be set on the property and the city, along with a contractor hired by the city to do this revaluation, essentially granted that request almost immediately.
WSHU: He got about a 45% reduction in taxes?
AB: That's correct. So it's about $8,000, a little over $8,000, in tax savings annually compared to what he would have been paying on that property had the assessment not changed.
WSHU: Now, was Gannon's name omitted from this request because his brother made it on behalf of the previous owner?
AB: There are records that we looked at that were filed in response to a complaint about all of this that showed that Gan's brother got permission ahead of time from the former owner to use her name to contest the tax assessment. Now, they did that because the property had not changed hands to that point. But when he went before, the city and the city's contractor, Ganim, had purchased the property just the day before in this informal hearing.
WSHU: Ganim is not the only one who appealed the revaluation of the property. More than 22,000 properties in Bridgeport were revalued and many of the owners appealed the new assessments. How many others could get their assessments brought down by about 45%?
AB: I think roughly seven or 800 people who actually filed for a hearing to have their tax assessment reconsidered In late 2020 or early 2021. When you look at just those properties, Ganam is by far one that received one of the biggest benefits. We looked not just at the people who filed complaints, but we looked at the 28,000 homes or 28,000 residential properties that were in the city of Bridgeport that year. Ganim was number 45, and that may seem like there's a lot ahead of him. Most of the other homes that are up in that top 45 were Habitat for Humanity homes, which the city automatically granted a tax reduction to because they were built by Habitat for Humanity and were currently owned by low-income homeowners.
WSHU: And so, a number of people filed complaints after they found out that Ganim had gotten such a huge reduction in his taxes. You talked about a couple of people who filed complaints and, and weren't able to get much out of the city as far as reductions on their taxes.
AB: So other people who filed complaints with the city made some of this, you know, kind of similar arguments, right? They were maybe more modest homes. These weren't 7000 square foot homes, they'd be 5000 square foot homes. And they essentially told the city similar things to what Ganim did, which is, 'Our property can't be worth what you're saying, we've owned it for three decades, we haven't made any upgrades to this property.'
In fact, some of the property has deteriorated to the point that you know, it's not gonna sell for what you're saying that this house is worth. Interestingly enough, we got a spreadsheet from the city that kind of detailed notes on a lot of these appeals that went before the Board of Assessment appeals, and there were notes in there on some of these that essentially had city employees or the City Assessor's Office or Board of Assessment Appeals. I'm not sure who was writing it. Saying that you know, the fact that someone hasn't made upgrades to their property in three decades isn't a justification for lowering someone's tax assessment essentially.
I think the quote was, 'The city shouldn't be paying for parents not upkeeping their properties.'
WSHU: But the bottom line Andrew, what is the city's position on this? That this is just regular business and it's not anything out of the ordinary.
AB: They have repeatedly said that everything about the purchase of the property and the resetting of the assessment on Ganim's property was done through the proper channels and was done in an approved way. And the fact that Ganim received one of the largest tax reductions that year, they argued was essentially the result of the unique nature of this property. And thus, as I described the story, they essentially argued that this was the result of savvy real estate investment, not his position as the mayor of Bridgeport.
