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Six Essex County towns brace for property-tax revaluations

By Philip Read/The Star-Ledger

October 12, 2009, 5:11AMDavid Gard/ New Jersey Local News ServiceWest Orange municipal building in a June photo. West Orange is among the six Essex County towns facing property tax revaluations.

ESSEX COUNTY -- William Connolly will have to come up with at least an extra $3,108 a year to pay his property taxes. That’s roughly $260 a month, enough to drive, say, a 2009 MINI Cooper convertible out of the showroom.
“It’s almost seems criminal to me that they can raise your taxes 60, 70, 80 percent and basically tell you, ‘Tough,’” said Connolly, who lives on Livingston’s Crossbrook Road.
The Essex County suburb’s first property revaluation since 1965 is unleashing the same kind of angst as those that proceeded it in such places as Maplewood and Montclair, but it also signals the tail end of a game of catchup.
At the dawn of the millennium, many Essex towns had not had revaluations for decades, creating wide disparities in assessments that had unfairly had some homeowners paying too much and some too little.
“The longer you go, the worse it gets,” said Joan Durkin, Essex County’s tax administrator.
Then, often at the nudging of the Essex County Board of Taxation, first Maplewood, then the others undertook the costly and politically uncomfortable tasks. Now, six of Essex’s 22 communities -- Bloomfield, Cedar Grove, Roseland, Verona, West Caldwell and West Orange -- remain to finish revals in 2010 and 2011.
“During a revaluation, emotions run high,” said Rick Del Guercio Jr. of Appraisal Systems Inc., which conducted the door-to-door revaluation inspections in Livingston, Montclair and in towns across a dozen New Jersey counties.
“It’s simply a redistribution,” Del Guercio said. “There are always people who go down. There are always people who go up.”
In Livingston, in fact, the average homeowner’s property tax bill actually went down -- by $429.72 a year. Many homeowners, particularly in an upscale gated community called “The Regency,” saw their tax bills nosedive.
Such was the case with Peter Hanauer’s. His property tax bill plummeted from $13,767 to about $7,432 -- a 46 percent savings. Hanauer realizes that he has been on the wrong seat of the property-tax seesaw.
“Overcharged for the first 8 years I lived here,” he said.
To make matters worse, he just happens to be relocating to Florida. “They reduced my taxes, and I’m moving,” he said with a sense of resignation.
For those who remain to feel a revaluation’s sting in New Jersey, with its first-in-the-nation property-tax burden, the extra tab came be particularly grueling amid “The Great Recession.”
Even if it’s “just” an extra $1,000 or so a year, as was the case with Alex Colatruglio, a neighbor of Connolly’s who lives in a 1,460-square-foot Colonial with his wife, Angela, and 1-year-old daughter, Ava.
“I’ve got to tighten up,” he said of expenses. “We haven’t really taken any vacations the last couple of years, only local daytrips down the shore. ... You see a cereal box lately? It’s half the size and double the money.”
He’s scratching his head, too, about the $418,600 value the appraisers put on his home, a figure he said is considerably higher than the $380,000 value a financial institution put on the property when he applied for a small home-equity loan.
“If the bank is not saying that’s what it’s worth, why is the town putting on higher value?” he said.It’s similarly perplexing for Arlene Newcomb, whose taxes on a circa 1800 colonial on E. Mount Pleasant Avenue soared from $8,745 to $14,271, not including this year’s usual increases in school, municipal and county taxes.
One reason, she said, is likely because of her large property, once part of an even larger farm. “There’s no comps,” she said of comparable sales used to determine a home’s value. “It was their best guess. ... I could understand if it was a house that was brand new, with upgraded electric and updated kitchen, but we’re living with extremely 1940s stuff.”
It is cases such as these that can lead to appeals. Fueled in part by the fallout from revaluations, there were 6,487 tax appeals in Essex this year, almost double 2008’s 3,631, according to the Essex County Tax Board.
Now, more by design than arm-twisting, Maplewood, whose earth-shaking 2001 revaluation kicked off the game of catchup, has just contracted with Appraisal Systems Inc. for another in 2011.
“Isn’t that ironic? Back in the hot seat again,” said Victor DeLuca, than as now Maplewood’s mayor. “We did say we’d do it every 10 years.”
Since it’ll be only 10 years -- instead of 20 -- there isn’t expected to be as a tectonic shift in the property burden, he said, but there will be some. The evidence can be seen in an unusually high number -- 160 -- tax appeals this year.
“People were starting to get their own tax breaks. We lost about $2 million in assessments based on those appeals,” DeLuca said. “That means the rest of the people have to pick up the slack.”
In Newark, whose 48,376 properties dwarf all others, some $4 million has already been set aside to undertake yet another revaluation for 2012. Some towns are voluntarily doing a reassessment, a process just short of a full-blown revaluation but still intended to iron out disparities.
“This is really good. They’re on top of things,” said Durkin, the tax administrator. “Everyone’s paying attention. ... This whole last 10 years have been a learning curve for everybody.”
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