This work paper is a visual of Jersey City’s 2023 long-term tax abatements available from the 2023 “User Friendly Budget” which is available from the city’s “Municipal Financial Reports” page here. A few pertinent details about this visual and the underlying document:
- The “User Friendly Budget” is a secondary budget form in addition to the regular budget. I wrote a series in 2020 about it here.
- The User Friendly Budget has the most transparent local view into the abatements because it includes key details like the assessed value as a comparative to the PILOT fees. That said, caveats do exist.
- The User Friendly Budget is looking one year with respect to the abatements; so, in the 2023 budget, we are getting a view of the abatements as of 2022.
- The “assessed value” column represents a “frozen-in-time” valuation that is rooted in a base dollar valuation from the time of the last Revaluation. What is equally important is the market value (also called equalized value) which we can compute by dividing Assessed Value by the Equalization Ratio (also available in the User Friendly Budget). That is included in my visual below.
- The User Friendly Budget, while helpful, is still not sufficient disclosure for taxpayers. For example, to better understand the abatements, the city could (and in my view should) publish a list of every long-term abatement along with the year of expiration. That would shed light on when the property will convert from abatement to conventional, and in turn it would shed light on the process of PILOT fees transitioning to regular property tax
- You can read more about this topic on my landing page for Abatements here.
