PRINCETON: Borough to seek missing revaluation data

By Victoria Hurley-Schubert, Staff Writer
   Princeton Fair Tax group members might get data pertaining to site value calculations in the revaluation that took place in the past year.
   Borough officials have vowed to check with Appraisal Systems Inc. (ASI) to see if there is any data the company has not handed over, even if it wasn’t included in the original contract.
   The tax group has threatened to sue to challenge the revaluation and get the information they are looking for. To avoid a lawsuit, borough officials said they are willing to pay to get the data if it was not included in what ASI was contractually obliged to hand over.
   Site values are used to place a cost on the right to live on a piece of land. According to the Princeton Fair Tax group, these values vary widely from neighborhood to neighborhood. The group is threatening to sue over what they are calling skewed revaluation results that do not accurately reflect the true values of homes in both the borough and the township.
   Councilman and mayoral candidate David Goldfarb offered his help at Tuesday night’s Borough Council meeting to assist in getting the data.
   Neal Snyder, the tax assessor, said the Township Committee was double-checking that all information was given to the municipalities and he thinks that all data ASI was obligated to hand over they handed over.
   ”There is information ASI has that they did not give to us,” he said.
   After checking with ASI after Open Public Records Act (OPRA) requests, “their answer was ‘we gave you everything we could give you,’” said Mr. Snyder.
   Councilman Goldfarb said the question is does ASI have information connecting to the Princeton revaluation that they were not required to give us?
   ”Is that information available to the public because it was a public contract, and if those answers are yes, how much would it cost us to get that information?”
   ”Is there any information they haven’t shared with us?” asked Mayor Trotman.
   Dale Meade, township resident, referenced the contract as the “defining instrument in carrying out the revaluation.”
   He said the biggest violation of the contract by ASI was the late submission of results.
   ”We do not have any idea how they came up with the land values, which are at the core of this problem with the shift of the assessment and tax burden from wealthy properties to more modest properties,” said Mr. Meade.
   He said Princeton Fair Tax has tried to replicate ASI’s process by using the same input data and using the methods the company described.
   ”We do not get their answers, we get different answers,” said Mr. Meade. “We need to know how they did that.”
   Jim Firestone, Borough resident and co-leader of Princeton Fair Tax, said the missing data will “prove conclusively one way or the other if the assessment was flawed.”
   He is grateful that Mr. Goldfarb is finally seeking answers to their questions.