Reminder: Civic Parent is for general teaching and educational purposes. Nothing on Civic Parent should be considered tax, accounting, or legal advice. Always consult a professional and come to agreed-upon terms if you need help with your specific facts and circumstances. With property tax appeals in particular, attorneys and real estate agents are licensed professionals...Continue reading
This post is part of a Civic Parent’s series, Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Decoding Your City Budget. This series is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB). In my previous post I looked at the idea of structural imbalance. In this post I want to dig...Continue reading
This post is part of a Civic Parent’s series, Take Your Seat at the Table: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Decoding Your City Budget. This series is a plain-language walk through New Jersey’s Municipal User Friendly Budget (UFB). In my last post, I wrote “Where the Money Goes: Local Government is Mostly People Cost” which pointed to structural...Continue reading
Consumers in 2024 are accustomed to modern technology automation (e.g., Netflix streaming, Chat GPT4, etc) but locals governments are slow to catch up. I share that contrast to frame the idea of property reassessments, which is the process of keeping assessed values (the value on your tax bill) updated, or in synch with, market values...Continue reading
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
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,...
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....
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
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
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
Let’s take a look at how a tax bill comes together. It’s an interesting and empowering exercise to tie your local government budgets – and the property taxes needed to fund them – to your personal property tax. Every year, the state publishes town-by-town property tax data here that includes a wealth of information including...Continue reading
Sharing an open letter and thoughts that I read into the record at the City Council meeting on Oct 7, 2020. I’m publishing it on CivicParent as part of a new area of content related to Jersey City’s increasingly outdated assessed values and the growing need for another revaluation. The last revaluation was in 2017/18....Continue reading
For the past 4 years I’ve been researching and writing about property taxes and revaluation (among other topics) on CivicParent. In the past year I’ve also written about tax appeals and I also served on a team of Jersey City Together volunteers in 2017 that helped over 30 residents save over $40,000 in tax expense...
I received my new tax postcard in the mail yesterday so I figured I’d share a breakdown of how to read it. This is very similar to the former tax post card, with some notable exceptions: You can now see your NEW tax assessed value. This is the value assigned to your property by Appraisal...Continue reading
February 27, 2018. Appraisal Systems released a new batch of assessments this morning and I was most curious about tax change in systemically over-taxed areas. I was hoping streets in Country Village would be listed because, per estimates released by Jersey City in December 2017, Country Village is expected to see the largest dollar-for-dollar tax...
February 25, 2018. I got a question recently about the tax rate as it relates to property taxes. It prompted me to write about the tax rate in a bit more detail to explain how the tax rate is changing, why it's changing, and what to expect in the coming months as the Revaluation unfolds. ...
Learn the basics about property revaluation in this 8-minute CivicParent tutorial:
Jersey City property taxes, as seen through state compliance data: Jersey City’s last citywide revaluation was in 1988. Jersey City’s 2017 equalization ratio is 23.66%. Jersey City’s 2017 coefficient of deviation is 35.66%. On this map: Green = under-taxed | Red = over-taxed NJ property tax law is based on this foundational premise: assessed values are supposed...
WHO conducted Jersey City’s property revaluation? In 2016 Jersey City hired Appraisal Systems, Inc. for $4.4 million to conduct the revaluation. Here are some helpful links about the firm: ASI’s website page for Jersey City residents here. ASI’s generic powerpoint that explains the Revaluation process is here. This is an excellent overview of the general process....Continue reading
Jersey City Together Tax Appeal Workshop. In March 2017 I worked with a team of Jersey City Together leaders to provide a tax appeals workshop. We invited homeowners to meet with us to determine if their homes were over-assessed which, in turn, helped us determine if they were over-taxed. It was a cooperative civic action involving...Continue reading
Jersey City is undergoing a multi-month Revaluation process and appraisal firm ASI, Inc. is currently assessing all properties throughout the city. I wrote about the April 3rd Ward “A” revaluation presentation, hosted by ASI, Inc, and one promise from that meeting: that an interactive assessment map would be made available. Good news – that map is now available!...Continue reading
I attended the Ward “A” revaluation meeting on April 3rd and had a chance to listen to a representative from Appraisal Systems, Inc., the third-party appraisal firm hired by Jersey City to conduct the revaluation. Mark Duda presented; he is an ASI executive and the designated ASI “project manager” for Jersey City’s revaluation. ASI, Inc. is one of...Continue reading