New York City resident Ellen Wolosh probably thought the city was joking when, in October 1990, they sent her a letter stating she had used about 1,377 gallons of water per day. Then she received the bill totaling $1,677 for the month. David Blake, who owns a small pharmacy in East Harlem, was forced to pay $7,635 in prop- y fees he didn't owe, so the city wouldn't take his building. New York Newsday investigative reporter Penny Loeb has plenty of Ellen Wolosh and David Blake stories to tell.
She spent the better part of four months delving through 21 nine-track tapes on her personal computer. The tapes contained 17-million property records for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. When she was finished, the compiled information provided a clear picture of the city's system of taxing its residents. In a three part series that ran in December, 1991 Loeb found: At least half of the city's tax foreclosure filings contain mistakes resulting in incorrect billing, bills sent to the wrong address or, worst of all, no bills arriving at all until the city sends a whopping bill of thousands of dollars in supposedly unpaid bills and taxes.
Thousands of homeowners lose their houses and property for unpaid bills and are charged rent by the city to stay. Even more are overcharged in their water and sewage bills. Loeb actually began investigating the city's property records in January, 1991. What she discovered and published then was that New York City had cloistered approximately $275 million in overpaid taxes from more than 200,000 property owners (See January, 1991 issue of Uplink).
She didn't stop there. "As soon as the other story came out in January, I started getting phone calls from people who had very strange billing problems, which showed me that there was a big prob- lem," Loeb said. "I wanted to get the billing records." She immediately ran into problems obtaining the records from the city departments of Finance and Environmental Protection. "I put in a request and nothing happened until late March, and at that point I asked the press person to intervene," Loeb said.
"In about six weeks, I got a tape, and then when I loaded it, it wasn't the right informa- tion. It was missing the properties that had been foreclosed on. So I went back and asked again." When she hit another road-block the Newsday attorneys jumped into the case, and in August Loeb got her data from the city Finance De- partment. "I just kept at it and kept at it and went to a higher-up attorney," she said.
Getting the water and sew- age billing records from the city Department of Environmental Pro- tection proved to be a two-month task. "They turned me down imme- diately, saying that what I wanted was at finance," she said. "It wasn't." With both sets of data firmly in hand, Loeb began the task of downloading 17 million records some of them variable length into her personal computer, using Nine- Track Express.
"It took forever," she said. "I could never do the entire city." She then began her computer work by XDB to examine the records for Manhattan. One of the easiest ways to check the city's accuracy is to see how many bills were sent to vacant lots, she explained. The hunch worked. By checking the city's billing records against its property records, Loeb found that about $2 million was billed to vacant lots between June 1990 and August 1991.
Indexing the data was mandatory, Loeb explained. She worked with several different data bases, the largest of which took up about 35 to 40 megabytes. The indexing took hours, but joining the two sets of data took even longer. Each combination required three "loads" and two "joins", she said. "Each one took about 48 hours of computer time. What I would do is leave the computer and let it do the joins overnight." The more time she spent working with the records, the more she uncovered.
"I knew that there were billing problems, but I didn't expect things like vacant lots getting water bills," Loeb said. "That's just one of those things you find going through the data." "One the most bizarre occurrences Loeb uncovered was a Long Island lot carrying a $60,664 tab for unpaid water bills. Despite the fact that city agencies thought the property housed the Water's Edge restaurant, Loeb found the lot to be vacant and under the East River.
"That was partly luck. It's just one of those that took a lot of regular reporting," she said. "I got the maps of the property and went out and physically walked the property. Finally the agencies admitted the restaurant wasn't on that lot. "One of the keys to working with such a large number of records is finding good sources in the city's computer departments," Loeb said. "I had sources that could explain the computer tape to me, when they were allowed to talk to me," she said.
"I (also) had property owners calling me, and I could look at their problem and look for others like it." To complement the database analysis, Loeb spent many more hours sifting through thousands of pages of documents, and conducted more than 100 interviews. About two weeks after the series ran and many New Yorker's eyebrows were raised, legislators announced they are seeking reforms in the city's billing strategies.
Loeb, of course, is pleased with her work. "It turned out to be a nice wrap-up to the year."