By Kayla J. Marsh
Staff Writer
LITTLE SILVER — To help weigh the decision about whether or not to continue in the Monmouth County Reassessment Demonstration Program, Borough Council members invited members of the county Board of Taxation to discuss the program and the pros and cons of participating.
“I do think it is extremely important that we get this right, and I think some of the steps back that have been taken over the last few months are problematic,” said Councilman Donald Galante at the council’s Jan. 25 meeting. “This program isn’t a step back; I think it is a huge step forward and an incredibly important one.
“Change is a very difficult thing to master, and I think that is some of the problem the rest of the county is having.
“The reality is the data and the technical capability to do [the program] exist, and it is ‘fair and equitable,’ which is what this system is supposed to be about.”
According to Monmouth County Board of Taxation Commissioner Cliff Moore, in the early 1970s, a law was passed called Chapter 123, which allowed assessments of homes to be within a range that could be 15 percent greater or lower.
“The reason behind that is, remember, we didn’t have the tools and computers that we do now, but what it did is, because by law you were supposed to get reevaluated every 10 years, there needed to be a buffer built into the system, so there was some stability with the assessments because we all know neighborhoods rise and decline on a regular basis,” he said.
Moore said over time, more houses were on the higher end, and very few houses were on the lower end of the assessment spectrum.
“This assessment program provides a fairer assessment and improves the transparency of the tax process, which allows taxpayers to understand what is going on,” he said. “Most people were overpaying their taxes with the old system, and they didn’t even realize it.”
Within the old model of “performing revaluations every 10 years,” property valuation occurred roughly every 10 years. With the demonstration program, property valuation will now occur every year and be conducted by the local assessor.
Within the old model of “performing revaluations every 10 years,” property inspection occurred roughly every 10 years, and with the new program will now occur every five years. The intention, according to Moore, is to verify the condition and details of each property.
To make the program more cost-effective, Moore said inspections of 20 percent of the town’s properties will be done annually, with 100 percent of properties being inspected within five years.
“When everybody is assessed at 100 percent of current market value, everything is a lot easier and ensures that everyone is paying their fair share of taxes,” Moore said.
County Tax Administrator Matthew Clark said the program was borne out of a concern that the next move was going to be county-wide assessing.
“With county-wide assessing, the fault was that it was going to be painted with a much broader brush than what we’re capable of doing,” he said. “The goal is for us to create an environment that is more precise to actually provide greater public service, and centralizing it might not be in our best interest … this is intended to be a complete reset of the tax system.”
Clark said one of the failings of the old system was the calendar and time frame in which things were done.
“It created a world where the assessments were created, towns created their budget, set a tax rate and then had appeals, so if there were any reductions in the number of appeals, you ended up having an under-collection for the town, and you ended up having to either emergency bond with interest or go into precious-funds balances, and how many years can you do that?” he asked. “That liability, that timing issue, all we did was we took the budgetary process and put it after the appeal process — we changed the calendar. It was that simple.
“Some people have pushed back … but I can say comfortably that [the] administrative change alone has saved Monmouth County taxpayers over $12 million in the last two years that would have otherwise been budgetary shortfalls that we would have had to handle in some other way.”
Borough Tax Assessor Gerald Briscione said while education about the program is key, it has started to make a difference in the borough.
“In 2015, the ratable base was $1,587,775, which was an 8.68 percent increase from 2014 and in 2016 was $1,632,766, which was about a 2.83 percent increase,” he said. “So the increases are slowing down … it is happening the way we are telling people it is happening,” he said. “Taxpayer-filed appeals also went down from 74 in 2014 to 40 in 2015 to 34 this year, so the system is doing what it is supposed to be doing.”
While Clark said there might still be some details to straighten out, he said, “What we are trying to do is not this unilateral, crystal-ball unproven process.
“The fact is nationally the trend is to do annual reassessments, [and] as a whole, we are capable of doing this.
“We didn’t create anything necessarily new; we changed our calendar and the fact is the other components are what we gathered from [the] best of breed outside of New Jersey [and] have assembled things that have been proven to work.”
He said for almost 20 years Somerset County has been succeeding in doing exactly what Monmouth County is trying to do and said statistically, Somerset has the most accurate assessments in the state.
“We want to create a mechanism that within the town makes it as fair as possible, and we are trying to create an environment where all the 53 municipalities in the county are performing in the same way,” Clark said.
Municipalities have until April to make a decision about whether to stay in the demonstration program or opt out of it, and some have already passed resolutions discontinuing their participation in the programs.
“The math about this program and the policy facts are inescapable — it works,” Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon (R-Monmouth) said. “It is a better, less expensive, far more transparent way of doing this, and to opt out is to opt out of all those benefits.
“Now that is not to say that we haven’t identified some flaws, but we have been very proactive with attacking them.”
Mayor Robert C. Neff Jr. said he remembered one of the first emails he got, when the borough joined the demonstration program, was about it being a money grab by the borough and governing body.
“There is just a fundamental misunderstanding with how taxes work, and it is a complex subject; nobody has a whole lot of patience for it, but it seems to me one of the biggest burdens we bear, maybe the biggest burden of this whole program is just continually educating because once people get it, it is deceptively simple,” he said. “Your assessed value is your market value.”
Moore agreed.
“We want you to understand that this tax board is not just sitting there saying ‘this is the law, this is what is going to happen,’” he said. “We own this program, and if it is broken, we’re going to fix it and are going to do whatever we can to make this thing work at the end of the day because our goal is to say this thing is so dynamic and it does the right thing for so many people it should be adopted across the entire state.
“Education is 100 percent what this commission is focused on, and we’ll meet with anybody and sit down with them, and if there is something wrong, we will work our hardest to get it corrected.”