Township's Reassessment Pains Far From Over, Say Officials

Township officials said they weren't fully satisfied after a recent meeting with county and state officials to correct what they say is a flawed property tax reassessment process in Barnegat. Township Committeeman Martin Lisella said higher-regulators continue to tie local leaders' hands, but said he would keep working to amend the current assessment, which has contributed a skewed tax burden here.

“It’s a lousy situation when the sitting town council can’t correct a situation to make everybody pay their fair share of taxes,” Lisella said.

Lisella and others on the committee have criticized Ocean County's rules regarding municipal reassments as overly complicated and ineffective. What he and others would like to see, Lisella said, is the state and county sign off on a yearly in-house reassessment process, as opposed to requiring municipalities to pay an outside group to do a partial reassessment. Officials here said that was the only plan the county would sign off on in 2010. 

Township employees and elected officials know better than anyone what property values are in Barnegat, Lisella said. He’s confident the township could fix the skewed reassessment map, which has some homes assessed near market value and others still assessed too high, leading some residents to pay proportionately more taxes than others.

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.”

He said it was clear that the township wouldn’t be able to conduct a full town-wide reassessment in 2012.

Lisella and township administrator David Breeden, who was also part of the meeting, said they would keep talking to the county and state to forge a new plan with solutions for the near and long term.

“Dialogue will continue,” Breeden said. “This is going to be a long process. Nobody has a magic wand that can be waved to fix it right away.” 

Correcting the uneven reassessments is critical, Lisella said, because tax appeals from frustrated homeowners continue to hurt the township financially. Each appeal costs the township money it could have saved with a proper reassessment, he explained. Officials have previously said more than 2,500 appeals have been filed in recent years.

“We’re not going to stop the fight,” Lisella said, because the expense of appeals is too great. “We’re going to spend more in losses on tax appeals than it would cost to do a total reassessment.”

Angelo Mureo, a resident who has been outspoken in his criticism of the township's handling of reassessments, said he feels local official's effort are too little, to late. He accuses the committee of allowing an inequitable assessment that focused on Barnegat's senior communities in order to curry political favor.

"They said themselves that nearly 50 percent of the tax appeals that came in came from those communities," Mureo said. "So they adjusted. That's not how you determine fair value. The township has not been transparent."