More New Yorkers join legal fight to halt pied-à-terre tax after Mamdani’s bungled rollout

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More New Yorkers are joining the legal battle against the state’s new pied-à-terre tax — with one claiming the city mailed his notice letter to a neighbor who lives nearly 30 stories below him, court documents show.

Four new plaintiffs have jumped onto the lawsuit filed by attorney Randy Mastro that seeks to pause the surcharge on luxury second homes in the Big Apple due to the Mamdani administration’s botched rollout of the new tax.

Among them is Kenneth Fishel, a real estate executive, who claims he was targeted with a letter from the city Department of Finance alerting him that he could be subject to the levy — despite paying taxes for years out of his Park Avenue co-op on the Upper East Side, the Tuesday filing shows.

But the DOF allegedly mistakenly labeled the letter, mailing it to one of Fishel’s neighbors who lives nearly 30 floors below him.

“Fishel only learned of and obtained a copy of the notice because he ran into his neighbor living 27 floors below him on the elevator,” the suit states.

“If I hadn’t run into him in the elevator, I never would have known, and I would have been billed for the full tax,” Fishel told The Post on Tuesday.

When Fishel went to file his exemption, the city’s database claimed one had already been submitted — “likely due to the fact that the mailed notice did not even list the correct names,” according to the filing.

The 17,000 notices sent out by the DOF alert property owners that they could be subject to a five-figure tax bill — unless they file for an exemption — under the law approved by state lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul in the spring.

As of last week, city officials said that about 4,290 homeowners who got the warning letters had contested them, and 1,906 had been approved so far.

All of the new plaintiffs on the suit — who claim primary homes in Chelsea and the Upper East Side — say they filed for exemptions to the tax, but haven’t been granted them yet, the filing shows.

They claim they faced issues navigating the city’s “tangled morass of an exemption regime,” despite not being subject to the surcharge, which covers one- to three -family homes worth at least $5 million and co-ops and condos valued at $1 million or more that are unoccupied, non-primary residences.

The city’s “messy, ill-considered, and atextual ‘exemption’ scheme” has yet to get them removed from the potential tax list, the suit claims.

The plaintiffs will “continue to suffer irreparable harm in attempting to apply for an ‘exemption’ to a tax that was not designed to burden them in any way,” they claim in the suit.

All of the new homeowners were told to expect to pay a pied-à-terre tax between $45,000-$58,000, according to the mailed notices filed in court.

Chelsea residents Stephen and Sandra Shore said they’ve lived at their home for over 30 years, paid their taxes dutifully, and yet were still hit with the dreaded notice.

Their attempts to file an exemption were repeatedly rejected by the Department of Finance’s system, the suit claims, forcing them to send a registered letter “in an attempt to simply submit their application.”

Carla Stearns, a Carnegie Hill neighbor of Mastro’s, said she has lived at her brownstone — valued by the city at $6.8 million — since she bought it with her husband in 2017.

Despite paying taxes and not owning any other property, she too got a letter informing her of an estimated $55,000 in extra taxes — unless she filed for an exemption, according to the filing.

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“We pay taxes here in the city, and we have for a long time. And the administration of this process has just been horrendous,” Fishel told The Post — after he testified at a City Council oversight hearing about the bungled rollout.

“They’ve totally botched the process,” he said. “They really need to withdraw all the notices and start again.”

The new plaintiffs join Staten Island residents Rachel O’Brien and Carmine Morano — the wife and father of City Councilman Frank Morano — along with Chelsea resident Simon Hedley, who was the only one of the three to receive a notice.

A Staten Island judge granted a temporary pause to the tax rollout after the suit was initially filed earlier this month, but that ruling was overturned by an appellate court after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration pushed back.

Mastro, in a letter to that same Staten Island judge, argued the new plaintiffs would “eliminate” the “specious mootness arguments” made by the city that one of the original New Yorkers who sued, self-described Mamdani supporter Hedley, was granted an exemption to the tax after filing for one.

City Hall did not immediately return a request for comment.