I recently met with high school student leaders in Jersey City Public Schools who are sharing stories of the conditions inside their schools. They go by the name “Revolutionizers of Jersey City High Schools” (r.o.j.c.h.s.) and have an Instagram channel here. Their pictures and videos give a glimpse of what they are experiencing on a...Continue reading
Category: Municipal
Jersey City Municipal Budgets: a high level visual review of 2015 through 2023
I was curious about Jersey City’s budgetary trends and so created a few high level visuals that I am sharing on CivicParent in case others were interested in understanding these documents in real-time, i.e. relevant to the current budget process in 2023. I wrote a series about the “user friendly” budget in 2020 if you...Continue reading
JCPS audit is informing about needed improvements
I’m playing catch-up (due to a busy spring), but I wanted to share important news from the JC Board of Education meetingon Monday, May 22nd (available here on Facebook) which is about the district’s annual audit. I read this report in the Jersey Journal and thought it was a good article about the meeting. I...Continue reading
Jersey City Municipal Budget, 2023: A visual walkthrough of the proposed budget
I dug into Jersey City’s municipal budget (as introduced on May 10th) and wanted to share a visual that I am using to better understand the budget. The one big constraint I find with Jersey City’s budget is that it is “locked” in PDF; I’m a visual thinker so I prefer to view data through...Continue reading
The local levy as connection between taxpayer and the local budget
This is part of a 2023 series about property tax in NJ. View the series landing page here. An upfront caveat: the levy is a topic with vast scope beyond what I can and want to cover here. There is a lot more you can reference; for instance, a good read if you have the...Continue reading
NJ’s 565 Municipalities & 21 County Tax Boards, Mapped
New Jersey has 21 county tax boards and I’ve got links to their websites below (links are current as of the writing of this post). Click on a county to see the related information including the county board of taxation websites. These links are current as of March 2023 and are of course subject to...Continue reading
Workshop #1: Property Tax Appeals (March 26th @2pm in SPU’s McIntyre Hall)
I'm excited to share my first workshop which will happen tomorrow, Sunday March 26th at 2pm in SPU's McIntyre Hall located on JFK Boulevard between Montgomery and Glenwood, which I've mapped below. The deadline for property tax appeals is rapidly approaching in Hudson County (and many other counties, too). To help community members engage the nuance,...Continue reading
Data Visualization of “Chapter 123” Law
This post is from 2023 and so some details are dated / relevant to last year. I will be writing more about tax appeals in 2024. In my previous post I touched upon “implied” market value. In this post I want to touch upon NJ’s “Chapter 123” law which I last wrote about in 2021,...
Property Tax Appeals & “Implied” Market Value
This post is from 2023 and so some details are dated / relevant to last year. I will be writing more about tax appeals in 2024. In advance of my upcoming property tax appeals workshop on March 26th, I’ve been thinking about how to distill property tax appeals math in the most intuitive way possible....
Your property tax bill & what it’s pointing to
The tax bill offers a highly personalized context to connect our property (the basis of our property tax) with the larger system of property taxation in the community (which involves the levy, the tax base, and the resulting tax rates). But the tax bill is not entirely transparent as to: determining if the assessed value...Continue reading
The local budget timeline
To follow the public money and better understand what’s driving your property tax bills, you have to know when to engage the process. Understanding the “when” can take a taxpayer into a series of bureaucratic rabbit holes (I’ve heard this feedback from others and I’ve also experienced it myself), so I want to disclaim upfront:...Continue reading
Jersey City set to lose $51 million in NJ education aid; how this connects to rising school tax
NJ's Department of Education released its state education aid summaries for the 2023/24 academic year and Jersey City is set to lose another $51 million next year. This will amount to $276 million in state aid reductions since the "S2" law was passed in 2018. Jersey City will likely lose $134 million by the time...
Property tax dashboard: visualizing tax levies, tax base, & tax rates from 1998-2022
This data was published by the NJ Department of Community Affairs (that site is here). Each year, the state collects prior year property tax data and published them in standalone Excel files. I’ve been compiling the data year on year and now have all of them in Tableau. In 2019 I published a property tax...Continue reading
Property Tax & Local Budgets, An Intro to the series
I am launching a 2023 series on CivicParent about the local government budget process and property tax. My hope is for this series to be: A practical roadmap for taxpayers who may want to engage the 2023 local budget cycle in their community. Primarily targeted at taxpayers who are relatively new to the realm of...