By Victoria Hurley-Schubert, Staff Writer
The revaluation that took effect last year is valid and not done through a flawed process, according to a the findings of the Princeton Joint Revaluation Study Commission.
”We believe that a reasonable person would conclude that the 2010 revaluation of the Princetons properties is difficult to challenge as improper in its methods or unreasonable in its results,” states the document.
”Appraisals are not a science,” the document continues. “They incorporate many assumptions that require the exercise of judgment, and there is room with each assumption for reasonable people to have differences of opinion.”
The commission is a group of six individuals and four elected officials even numbers from each municipality that were charged with taking an independent look at the revaluation process and recommend remediations regarding the revaluation that went into effect last year.
Commission officials declined to comment until findings are formally presented to the media later this month. The findings will also be presented to the governing bodies in the near future.
The revaluation has caused a lot of upset among residents of the borough and township, where some values jumped as much as 60 percent, raising property taxes substantially.
The document also contains 17 recommendations to clarify the assessment process and make appeals less intimidating.
The controversial revaluation process has spawned a citizens group, the Princeton Fair Tax Revaluation Commission (PFT), which is preparing to proceed with legal action to challenge what they call unjust assessments.
”I have read the report in its entirely and I’m disappointed it didn’t do more analysis of whether the revaluation was systematically flawed,” said Jim Firestone, leader of PFT. “Dale Meade (another member of PFT) and I met with them in February for three hours, but somehow they didn’t seem interested in our findings, they only seemed interested in avoiding a lawsuit. So our feeling is they missed their chance of helping their municipalities.”
The group is alleging the revaluation, conducted by Appraisal Systems Incorporated (ASI), was systematically flawed and led to inflated land values and deflated home values. This in turn has caused smaller homes on small lots to see increases in their property taxes some as much as 60 percent increases and larger homes, called McMansions, to lose value and decrease in taxable value. Residents are still puzzled over the increase in land values, which in some cases went up three or four times and how the assessment company came to the amount of the land value.
For the remedies, the compliance plan, which allows for the adjustment of up to 50 percent of properties, was only analyzed on the surface, said Mr. Firestone. He said no in-depth analysis was done and a lot of the information in the report has been published elsewhere and aren’t new findings. “It’s filler that makes the report look big,” he said. “It’s obvious to me.”
”No remedies have any chance of success,” he said. “That leaves us without a remedy, except for the Princeton Fair Tax remedy.”

