The Tax Assessment Merry-Go-Round

I’d like to start this blog out with this statement taken from the New Jersey Association of County Tax Boards website. It is from Section 901.1 of the Tax Assessors Handbook and it concerns the need for maintaining yearly assessments after a costly town wide re-valuation has been completed. Here it is verbatim:

“901.1 Once it is assumed that assessments on all properties in a taxing district have been made equitably, either as a result of a revaluation program or through local action, the assessor must devote his or her attention to keeping the assessments equitable.

 This work breaks down into two principal areas:

(1) the location and assessment of new taxable property; and

(2) the identification of trends in property value throughout the taxing district, and the adjustments where justified.

Unless and organized effort is made to meet these two situations, even the most perfect assessment list will soon become out of date, and the funds spent for a revaluation or the effort expended in carrying out a reassessment program will have been wasted."

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? This is exactly what has happened here in Barnegat, not once, but twice in less than three years. And it cost us plenty. As I read the Patch article about the meeting of the minds Toms River, I see that it is government at work at its finest.

This statement from the article says it all:

This month’s meeting didn’t go far toward achieving what the township wants, said Lisella. "I’m not sure they know who’s in charge of what,” he said. “They ran a lot of rules and regulations by us,” but Lisella said when he suggested following the state of Florida’s lead and conducting annual reassessments, “they didn’t even want to hear it.”

Of course they don’t want to hear it Mr. Lisella, but it is your job to make them hear it. My opening statement taken from the Tax Assessors handbook is the first thing that should have been laid out in front of them. People in the upper echelon of county, local and state government don’t want to do the extra work. They like to make it more difficult than it really is, they like to keep it complicated. They keep a job, the professionals get paid, the re-val companies get paid, the problem never gets fixed, and the taxpayer gets screwed. That’s why it takes five people in government to do the job of one person in the private sector.

Barnegat wants answers as to why you can’t assess yearly. Other towns in NJ do it, and that is fact! What kind of Property Assessment Manager Software (PAMS) does Barnegat use? Does Barnegat afford itself the use of Computer Assisted Mass Assessment (CAMA) software as offered by a company such as Tyler Technologies (a company whose software was bought by the state of New Jersey to help them in appraisal and assessments of real property throughout the state)? Here is a link to them with some very interesting info about appraisal maintenance software:

http://www.tylertech.com/solutions-products/appraisal-tax-solutions/cama-assessment/iasworld

I’m no tax assessor, but the bottom line is if the state buys software to help them, it should be good enough for municipalities to use to maintain their tax rate, right?

So Mr. Lisella and Mr. Breeden, if you see that the county is blocking our tax assessor and our tax office employees by not allowing them to maintain our assessments yearly, and knowing that the tools to do it fairly and most efficient are available, then it is time to get some names and make them public. If you are saying that what they are trying to do is ludicrous, and it does sound that way, Barnegat wants to know who these people are.

Here is another idea. Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for other government agencies to do Barnegat's work and do our own. I’d like to know if and what the plan was that Barnegat took to the county explaining how we were prepared to assess this town yearly so that we would not have another thousand tax appeals next year. Marty Lisella and Albert Bille are full time committee members, required by law to work for us at least 35 hours a week. They are perfect for this job being in real estate. Keep at em’ boys, you know how government works, they try to dazzle you with rules and regs that don’t even pertain to what you want to accomplish. I would expect to see meeting after meeting happen until something gets done, wouldn’t you Barnegat?

Link to the Tax Assessors Handbook Chapter on Maintainence of Assessments:

http://www.njactb.org/Handbooks/2005%20Assesors%20Handbook/Ch.9-maintenance%20of%20assessments.pdf