Tinton Falls Will Hire Revaluation Firm for $48,000
By ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Tinton Falls will hire Realty Appraisals of West New York for $48,000 to complete a revaluation in the borough.
The money is now in place to get the first revaluation since 1989 under way but residents will still not see the results on their tax bills until 2007.
At a special meeting on Tuesday night, the Borough Council unanimously adopted a bond ordinance for an emergency appropriation not to exceed $500,000” to pay for the revaluation.
They (Realty Appraisals) are familiar with the town. They did our revaluations in 1978, 1983 and 1989, Mayor Peter Maclearie has said. Theyve also done many other towns in the state.
The county orders revaluations and its deadline for the borough to complete the process is Oct. 1. However, residents will not see any change reflected in their tax bills until August of 2007.
It will hit the books Jan.1, 2007, said Chief Financial Officer Steve Pfeffer. But from a technical standpoint, as billing goes, nothing (changes) would hit until the August bill. Any adjustment, increases and decreases, will be made up on those bills.
In other words, they will be retroactive.
The residents of the relatively new upscale Willowbrook Farms development have been pushing for the revaluation because they feel that their municipal tax rates have been skewed for years because their new homes are assessed closer to market value than most others in the borough.
The last borough-wide revaluation took place in 1989, so Willowbrook residents, whose new homes were assessed only a couple of years ago, feel that too many others in town are paying taxes based on old assessments that reflect values that are much lower than current market rates.
On the books, the average property in town is valued at $153,000. Most of the Willowbrook properties are valued at $1 million plus. The residents gripe hit a zenith when the 2006 municipal budget was introduced recently and proposed a 16-cent per $100 of assessed property value hike. For many of the Willowbrook residents that would mean paying roughly $2,000 more in municipal taxes a year.
Their hope is that the revaluation will decrease their tax bill. However, there is no guarantee of that. Pfeffer has said that normally a revaluation brings with it a decrease to one third of the tax bills, an increase to another third and the other third of bills remain level.
Were moving as fast as we can, said Mayor Peter Maclearie. Nobody is discriminating against this one group of residents. We have no control over when revaluations take place. The order comes from the county and then it is pursued.
Now the contract with Realty Appraisals must be approved by he state Division of Taxation, said Borough Administrator W. .Bryan Dempsey.
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