OCEANPORT — At the county’s direction, the borough is planning to carry out a revaluation of properties that will likely take up to a year to complete, with updated assessments expected to be on the books by 2017.
During the June 4 meeting, the Borough Council authorized a five-year emergency appropriation for $185,000 to fund the borough wide reval.
“Under the law, when you have a revaluation to be done, you are allowed to spread that out over a five-year period, and that’s what all the towns end up doing,” Business Administrator John O. Bennett III said. “That way the taxpayers don’t get hit hard with it.”
According to Bennett, the council has authorized Maser Consulting to update the borough tax maps. Once the state approves the tax maps, which could occur within the next two months, the borough will then go out to bid for a firm to conduct a property revaluation.
The revaluation is necessary for implementation of a new county tax program.
Because several municipalities had not authorized a revaluation for close to 10 years, the county ordered revaluations for 28 of its 53 municipalities — including Eatontown, Fair Haven, Long Branch and Red Bank — during the past year as part of the Real Property Assessment Demonstration Program.
The county program was instituted to help decrease tax appeals by leveling assessments and to eliminate the need for costly revaluations.
The program, which began in 2014, is designed to reduce the need for municipalities to bond for revaluations by having properties reassessed on a yearly basis inhouse.
Under the program, costly townwide revaluations, which are normally carried out every 10 years, are replaced with the inspection of 20 percent of properties and a townwide readjustment based on sales data.
Another component of the law is that tax appeals are now filed and heard prior to the municipal budgets being struck, while previously the appeals were finalized after the budgets were adopted and towns were left scrambling to make up the difference in tax revenues.
According to data provided by the county, Oceanport last conducted a revaluation in 2006. The borough also had a revaluation in 1990 and a reassessment in 2010.
In the first year of the demonstration program, municipalities across the county saw a decrease of nearly 2,000 tax appeals filed.