The Jamestown BPU’s Dow Street substation, located near the city’s border with Ellicott, is pictured. P-J file photo

There will be no annexation of a Jamestown Board of Public Utilities substation located in Falconer – but BPU officials want the taxable assessment on the substation lowered.

On Tuesday, the BPU filed a tax certiorari case in state Supreme Court in Mayville seeking an assessment reduction on the four parcels the BPU owns in Falconer from $6,592,856 to $5,274,248.80.

According to the settlement agreement of the annexation proceeding that ended earlier this year, there is supposed to be a 20% reduction of the current assessed valuation of the Jamestown BPU’s Dow Street Substation parcels by way of an exemption granted by the Falconer Central School District, town of Ellicott, village of Falconer for 10 years, in consideration for the city’s discontinuance of the pending annexation proceedings and its agreement not to begin annexation proceedings again.

The assessment roll filed by the town does not include the agreed upon decreased tax assessment.

“Petitioner is aggrieved and will be injured by the excessive assessment because petitioner will be compelled to pay a larger portion of taxes than is its fair and proportionate share, and which it would not be required by law to pay if its assessment had been made correctly and properly,” the court filing states.

The annexation case originally started in January 2017, under former Jamestown Mayor Sam Teresi. A three-member Fourth Department Appellate Division ruling in 2019 dismissed the city’s original annexation request on a technicality, ruling the city hadn’t filed its initial court filings in state Supreme Court within a 30-day window prescribed in state law. As part of that 2019 ruling, the Appellate Division did not make any ruling on the merits of the case.

The Board of Public Utilities and city then started a new annexation proceeding in March 2020 when Eddie Sunquist was mayor. In November, state Supreme Court Justice Lynn Keane ruled the substation property proposed for annexation extends to the centerline of Tiffany Avenue, where it adjoins the city’s existing municipal boundary. That decision had been upheld by the Fourth Department Appellate Division, but nothing happened in the case until city officials reached a deal with Ellicott, Falconer and the Falconer Central School District to end the annexation with the deal approved this spring.