Readers often come to Civic Parent for the first time because of a pain point: rising taxes, a library is closing or hours are shortened due to funding cuts, teachers are at risk of layoffs because of funding cuts.

Your tax bill is like the tip of a thread that connects to a wider of ecosystem of local finance.

Learning how your tax bill connects to that wider ecosystem is a good first step but to really get under the hood of local finance you must also look at Local Budgets (which is what your tax bill helps fund), Public Schools (which are an essential resource for the community's children), and Tax Abatements (which is a revenue source in addition to the property tax that can structurally impact the long-term horizon of the property tax paradigm).

If and when property taxes rise, it is important that the burden of that increase be shared fairly. That requires ongoing maintenance of assessed values (ensuring your tax value is fairly pegged to market value). If and when a municipality delays assessment maintenance, tax unfairness can creep into the system.

A "tax appeal" and "property revaluation" can be thought of as two sides of the same coin where:

1. A property revaluation is when the municipality is fulfilling its mandate to keep assessed values fair (uniformly pegged to market) by conducting a systemic re-assessment of properties
2. A tax appeal is where the burden of that assessment is placed on the individual property owner to claim tax fairness through the process of a tax appeal.

Learn more about appeals and revaluation:

In Jersey City, the property tax landscape has been like a rollercoaster and it's dizzying. A few big changes have impacted Jersey City in the last 10 years:

1. A long-stalled Revaluation was conducted in 2018 which was surprised downtown (Ward "E") homeowners, many of whom may have been unaware that the pre-2018 assessments were rooted in a 1986 base year paradigm. An often under-reported and not-as-widely-understood paradigm is that prior to the 2018 Revaluation, homeowners in other areas of the city had been systemically overtaxed for years.
2. The "S-2" law passed in Trenton in 2018 leading to state aid cuts; this led to the retraction of state education aid beginning in 2018, and forced the Jersey City Board of Education (BOE) to raise its local school tax to fill the gap. Read more about this on my Public Schools page.

Underlying these two big changes: many factors, one of which I've focused on...the role of  tax abatements, which are an important factor for a few reasons.

1. Tax abatements helped Jersey City grow its tax base (they did their intended job)
2. Tax abated properties did not contribute to the school tax levy, leaving the school tax coffers exposed as too low when, in 2018, state lawmakers enacted the "S-2" law.
3. Tax abated properties contribute to the city coffers in the form of PILOT fees which are a revenue on the city's budget but not the schools budget.
4. However, as abatements sunset and convert to conventional tax-paying properties, the city must now surrender the PILOT fees and share the school tax with the County and Schools.

Importantly, tax abatements are policy tools thus not 'all bad' or 'all good.' They can be used to help build new market-rate housing but also to build affordable housing. Nuance abounds and so it's important to engage the nuance to understand the trade-offs. I share more details on the Local Budgets and Tax Abatements pages.

Why Taxpayers Need to Engage

The average homeowner is left to make sense of a complicated landscape that is rooted in three different budgets, a state aid paradigm for our public schools, a growing city, and more.

I encourage readers to demand clarity and plain facts from elected.