By Dr. Yusef Ismail | Community Contributor September 5, 2026
(Newark, NJ) Your county tax bill just went up 56 percent, and two grown men are publicly arguing about whose fault that is.
That's the fight in one sentence. Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka and Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo have spent the last two weeks trading op-eds like open letters between rival kingdoms — each one sharper than the last, each one daring the other to answer it. And underneath all the finger-pointing sits a number that's already sitting in your mailbox.
Three months ago, I told you Newark's street fight had left the city limits and moved to a bigger, wealthier arena: the Essex County Board of Commissioners. Voters showed up June 2nd, the machine held most of its ground, and one insurgent — Deb Engel — broke through anyway. Everyone assumed the smoke would clear after that. It didn't. It thickened. And now the two most powerful men in this county aren't fighting through proxies anymore. They're fighting each other, directly, over your money.
Here's the ledger, laid bare.
Every feud needs an origin wound. This one is $37 million wide.
That's how much more Newark residents now owe Essex County than they did twelve months ago — the county tax levy on the city climbing from roughly $66.5 million to $103.5 million in a single budget cycle. The county tax rate, already the steepest of any municipality in Essex, is rising from $3.99 to $4.23. Translate that into human terms and the average Newark homeowner's county tax contribution just leapt from $991 to $1,551.
That's not a rounding error. That's a car payment. A month of groceries for a family of four. A kid's travel basketball season. And it landed on a population that was already stretched to its last thread.
Mayor Baraka struck first, publishing an editorial on August 28th that put language to a grievance a lot of us have carried for years without ever seeing it laid out in cold arithmetic: Newark is shouldering the weight of a county that has never paid its share of the load.
His case is simple, even if the politics around it aren't. Essex County owns 55 tax-exempt properties inside Newark's borders — courthouses, college buildings, social-service offices, parks and park administration sites. Together, they carry an assessed value of $717.2 million. Apply Newark's own tax rate to that land, as you would to any other landowner, and the county would owe the city roughly $30.3 million a year. Instead, it owes nothing — while Newark still pours the asphalt outside those buildings, staffs the fire trucks that answer their alarms, and keeps the streetlights burning after dark.
Fold in county, state, Port Authority, and Newark Housing Authority land, then add churches, hospitals, and universities, and Baraka lands a number that should stop every Newark taxpayer cold: more than one-fifth of the land in this city generates zero property tax revenue, while its 323,000 residents are billed in full for a county that treats their home as a rest stop.
Newark is the host. Essex County is the guest. And the guest hasn't paid rent since the last century. That's the punch Baraka threw — and it landed.
Six days later, on September 3rd, DiVincenzo hit back — hard.
He opened by calling Baraka's focus on Essex County "misguided," then spent the rest of his letter reciting a résumé built over two decades: he inherited a $64 million deficit on his first day in office, has delivered a balanced county budget on or before January 15th for 23 consecutive years, and has held the average annual county tax increase to a mere 1.07 percent over the last ten years — third-lowest of New Jersey's 21 counties across 24 years. The county's bond rating, he noted, now sits at AA+, one rung below the gold standard.
Then the letter turned on Newark itself. His sharpest thrust:
"The City of Newark does not pay Essex County property taxes — residential and commercial property owners pay Essex County taxes."
The city just collects and forwards the money, as state law requires. Calling it "Newark's money," he argues, is a kind of civic sleight of hand. And he went further — accusing the city of pocketing an extra $30 million from its own taxpayers instead of remitting it to the county on schedule, then taking a $30 million bailout from the state to paper over the hole it created.
He wasn't finished. DiVincenzo pointed to Newark's long-delayed property revaluation — homes across the city are still assessed at less than half their real market value — calling it a self-inflicted wound that's cost Newark taxpayers an estimated $20 million by distorting how the tax burden gets spread around.
He also flagged Newark's PILOT payments: developer agreements are supposed to route five percent back to the county, and DiVincenzo says the city's first such payment in years — a mere $2.4 million, badly overdue — didn't arrive until September 1st.
He closed by telling Baraka, who ran for governor last year and lost, to "act like a statesman" instead of using his platform to take shots at people who serve Newark's residents every day. That line was aimed as much at Baraka's future as it was at the dispute in front of them.
A credible counter. Real numbers. But notice what it doesn't answer — the actual claim about the 55 properties and the $717 million in exempt land. Keep that in your back pocket. It matters in a minute.
The mayor's reply came fast, and it didn't soften. Two lines are already circulating across Newark social media — screenshotted, underlined, argued over in comment sections at midnight.
To DiVincenzo's claim that county services arrive in Newark free of charge, Baraka didn't dress it up:
"We know this isn't true. Nothing is free. Our taxes pay for all of it."
His logic is easy for any resident to follow, which is exactly why it's spreading. Corporate giants headquartered in Newark — Prudential, Audible, Amazon, Verizon, United — get the same municipal services the county enjoys at its 55 properties: police coverage, fire protection, snow removal, road maintenance.
The difference is those corporations actually pay property and payroll taxes into the system that serves them. The county pays nothing. Baraka isn't asking Essex County to disappear. He's asking why one tenant gets billed and the other gets a permanent pass.
On the "bailout," Baraka rejects the word outright. What DiVincenzo calls a rescue, Baraka calls a loan — drawn specifically to absorb the shock of the $37 million levy increase, and one the city intends to repay. That distinction isn't cosmetic. A bailout implies a government too broken to manage its own affairs. A loan implies a bridge over a gap the county itself created.
And when DiVincenzo pointed out that it's Newark's residents, not Newark's government, who technically pay the county tax, Baraka turned it right back on him:
"That is precisely the point!"
The $37 million lands on homeowners and property owners no matter which line of the org chart it travels through. If anything, Baraka argues, that's the entire reason this fight is worth having.
Here's the detail almost nobody's saying out loud, and it changes how you should read everything above: DiVincenzo is on the ballot in November.
He just won his Democratic primary for a seventh term as County Executive and now faces Republican Maritza Matthews on November 3rd. This entire dispute — every dollar figure, every "misguided," every reference to his 23-year record — is unfolding two months before he has to defend that record at the polls. Baraka just handed DiVincenzo's opponents a $37 million reason to question every word of his own campaign pitch.
Baraka, by contrast, isn't on any ballot right now. He ran for governor last year, lost the primary, and endorsed the eventual nominee. But this fight keeps him exactly where his political brand thrives — standing between working-class Newark and "the machine," office or no office. Principled tax-fairness advocacy, or a mayor keeping his name in the conversation for whatever comes next? Probably both. That's not an accusation. It's just how politics works, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
I've shown you the punches. Now let me step out of the ring and tell you what's actually confirmed — because both men are counting on you to pick a side before you check.
Confirmed, on the record:
Still disputed — demand the paperwork before you repeat these as fact:
Notice something: DiVincenzo's response never directly disputes the 55-properties, $717.2-million figure at the heart of Baraka's original claim. He answered a different question — the county's overall fiscal discipline — instead of the specific one Baraka asked. That doesn't make DiVincenzo wrong about everything else. It does mean the central number in this fight is still standing unchallenged.
Anybody who tells you they've got this fully sorted from two op-eds is selling you something.
For Newark residents. Your tax bill is the battlefield, not a talking point in someone else's campaign. Whoever's "right," the increase is real and it's already in your mailbox. The city owes you a plain-language breakdown of exactly where every dollar goes — municipal, school, county — instead of dueling op-eds written for an audience of political insiders.
For DiVincenzo. He now walks into a November election having to defend two decades of fiscal stewardship against a specific, public, arithmetic-heavy challenge from the state's most prominent Black mayor — one he hasn't fully rebutted yet.
For Baraka. This fight cements him as the loudest voice on a question that could become real statewide policy: how New Jersey's county-seat cities — Newark, Trenton, Camden, New Brunswick — absorb the cost of hosting tax-exempt regional institutions that serve everyone but tax no one. Turn this into an actual bill in Trenton, and it becomes a legacy. Leave it at the op-ed level, and it's just noise ahead of his next campaign.
For Essex County, and for New Jersey. Every county seat in this state carries the same structural imbalance. If Newark and Essex County produce a real fix — a host-municipality tax credit, a PILOT-style formula, anything with teeth — it becomes the blueprint every other county seat points to for a decade. If it doesn't, this was just theater.
Two powerful men are calling each other liars in public. Normally, that's just noise. This time it isn't — because underneath the insults sits a question that predates both of their careers: when a county plants its courts, its colleges, and its jails inside your city, who pays for the ground beneath them?
Newark has been asking that question quietly for decades. Baraka just asked it loudly, in an election year, aimed squarely at the man who's run this county for more than twenty years. DiVincenzo answered like a man defending a record he's proud of — and like a man who knows exactly what November holds.
So here's the question for you, not for them: Is Newark finally calling out a county that's been getting a free ride for decades — or is Baraka picking a fight with a popular incumbent two months before an election, using your tax bill as ammunition? Tell me where you land in the comments.
Because your tax bill doesn't care who wins the argument. It just keeps climbing.
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