Governor Christie will be in Aberdeen today to accept the endorsement of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) for his reelection bid.
Before wingnut conservatives get all crestfallen or disgusted, let me remind you that the Teamsters endorsed Ronald Reagan. A labor union’s endorsement doesn’t automatically make that Republican a RINO, unless you consider Reagan a RINO.
Yes, this means that New Jersey is not likely to become a “Right to Work” state so long as Christie is governor, It also means that we will continue to overpay “prevailing wage” on government funded and supported construction projects. As our friends at InTheLobby point out, it also explains why Christie has thwarted efforts to expand legalized gambling in New Jersey to race tracks, but those are all other stories.
What the LIUNA endorsement really means is that New Jersey Democrats are not likely to make a fight of the gubernatorial campaign in 2013. Christie’s post Sandy poll numbers make him look invincible. By locking up a major union endorsement early, Christie is creating an air of inevitability for reelection.
Due to the major property damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, many are faced with value assessments that are no longer accurate. Even though this may not affect you directly, please feel free to pass this information along to friends, families, and neighbors that may find this useful.
Under current State law, property value is assessed based on the condition of the lot and the buildings as of October 1st for the following tax year. In other words, the 2013 property tax bills are based on the value of the property as of October 1st, 2012
However, State law contains a provision which states that a property with a building or other structure that has been destroyed by a storm between October 1st and December 31st can have assessment reduced to reflect the depreciation in value for that property. The landowner must provide the assessor with notice prior to January 10, 2013. The assessor must then base the assessed value of the property according to its condition as of January 1, 2013.
Only 9 weeks remain to provide this notice to municipal assessors.
As for the November 1st property tax bill (fourth quarter 2012), a property taxpayer must pay that bill in full by November 10th to pay the fourth quarter bill. Also, a municipality may pass a resolution that establishes a zero percent interest rate for tax payments made after November 10th.
Governor Chris Christie took his Endless Summer tax relief tour to Long Beach Island this afternoon.
About half way through this APP video the governor addresses municipal consolidation incentives as a method the state is providing to reduce property taxes. Chrisite is laugh out loud funny in mimicking public opposition to consoldiations.
The bill, S589, that Senator Jennifer Beck and Senate President Steve Sweeney have sponsored to address New Jersey’s “Fake Farms” will not close any fake farms and will not increase property tax revenues. It will create new bureaucracy on the state, county and municipal levels of government. It will increase the costs of municipalities evaluating what is a farm and what is not a farm.
New Jersey’s farmland assessment law dates back to 1964. It provides that properties of 5 acres that generate revenue and payments of $500 from crops or livestock be assessed as farms for property tax purposes. Properties over 5 acres must produce $5 per acre to qualify under the proposed law. $.50 per acre for wetlands. Dogs are excluded as livestock, President Obama’s childhood dietary habits notwithstanding.
S589, let’s call it “Karcher’s Law,” would increase the minimum level of revenue a “farm” must produce to $1000.
Beck used former Senator Ellen Karcher’s use of the farmland assessment law as a major issue in her 2007 campaign to replace Karcher in the Senate. Karcher classifies 6 acres of her 9 acre Marlboro home as a Christmas tree farm, saving $14,000 in property taxes.
I can see the campaign literature now. “We ended fake farms by doubling the required production of these so called farms.” Gullible homeowners will nod and be grateful that their property taxes increased only 3% while the lawyers, lobbyists, rock stars and politicians who avoid tens of thousands in property taxes send in their campaign contributions.
Products that cost $500 in 1964 would cost $3,711.05 today. 500 of today’s dollars would have bought you $67.37 of merchandise in 1964.
Clearly, increasing the required revenue generated from a “farm” from $500 to $1000 will not end the abuse. Increasing the required revenue to the inflation adjusted $3,711.05 will not end it either.
There is a provision in the proposed law that creates a State Farmland Evaluation Advisory Committee comprised of the Director of the Division of Taxation, the Dean of Rutgers College of Agriculture and the Secretary of Agriculture. The committee will conduct periodic reviews of the minimum farm revenue and payment requirements. Maybe Sweeney and Beck are counting on the bureaucrats to come up with an equitable solution to the problem. Not likely, but we can’t say for sure as neither Senator returned a call asking for an explanation of the bill.
There is another provision of the proposed bill that eliminates the “roll back tax” for fake farms that are declassified. Under the current farmland assessment law, properties that are declassified as farms are subject to retroactive property taxes at a fair market valuation for a number of years. The proposed law would only tax declassified farms at fair market value going forward, so long as the property owner continues their fake farming. Maybe this is the real intended teeth of the proposed bill. We’ll ask Beck or Sweeney if either of them calls back.
S589 was passed by the Senate Environment and Energy Committee on Thursday and sent to the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.
Hopefully the Senate Budget and Appropriation Committee, of which Beck is a member, will amend the bill so that it really does eliminate the practice of middle class homeowners subsidizing hobby farms of wealthy and connected landowners.
The Asbury Park Sun reports that the Village of Loch Arbour is moving forward with its plan to seek a merger with its neighbor to the north, the Borough of Allenhurst.
Loch Arbour is .1 square mile and home to 196 people, according to the 2010 U.S. census. The metropolis of Allenhurst in three times the size of of Loch Arbour by land mass, but has a much lower population density of 496 residents per the most recent census. Should the towns merge, they would form a municipality just south of Deal, the 1.3 square mile borough that is home to 750 year round residents.
Loch Arbour has a municipal budget of $1,243,058. That’s $6,342 per capita or $25,368 per family of four. Allenhurst’s municipal budget in $4,344,268; $8,760 per capita.
Obviously, it is not municipal spending that is prompting the 196 Loch Arbourians to give up their sovereignty. It is school spending.
Loch Arbour sends its 20 school age children to the Ocean Township Schools. The Corzine administration invalidated a school funding agreement between Loch Arbour and Ocean Township that was worth about $300,000 per year. The new formula required Loch Arbour to pay school taxes based upon their property values. That $300K became $1.6 million. Allenhurst sends it school kids to the Asbury Park school system, an Abbott District that the entire state subsidizes. If the merger goes through, property taxes in Loch Arbour will fall from an average of about $24,000 per home to less than $9000. Not bad, relative to property taxes throughout the rest of the state, for homes valued at over $1.4 million on average.
The Editorial Board of the Monmouth and Ocean Counties paper of record actually met with local mayors! Call that progress. MMM criticised the APP editorial board last month for sitting down with Newark Mayor Cory Booker for no reason other than to boost Booker’s statewide name ID when they, until yesterday, hardly, if ever, meet with local mayors.
Middletown Mayor Tony Fiore and Long Branch Mayor Adam Schneider met with the Neptune Nudniks on Wednesday, at the behest of the League of Municipalities. The mayors’ purpose was to bring attention to the State’s decades old practice of keeping the energy receipts tax that public utilities pay.
In energy receipts tax has been in existence for decades. It was originally set up in lieu of property taxes to compensate municipalities for the utility infrastructure rights of way. The tax used to be broken out on your utility bill. It was paid by the utilities directly to the municipalities.
In 2002, during the McGreevey administration, the State started collecting to tax. We all know what happens to money when to goes to the black whole of Trenton for redistribution. Much of it disappears and the intended recipients get shafted. Think Unemployment Insurance Fund and Transportation Trust Fund.
Fiore told MMM that the League sued McGreevey to get the money but the State just turned around a reduced State Aid by a commensurate amount.
Fiore, Schneider and the League now want that money back. It’s not coming, according to what State Treasurer Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff told the APP, “At this time we do not have the financial flexibility to make discretionary adjustment” to provide more from energy taxes.
Fiore told MMM that the energy receipts tax would have provided $4 million dollars to Middletown Township in 2011. That would have saved the Library surplus the Township relied on, prevented layoffs and cleaned up a few snow storms.
What burns Fiore is not just the $4 million that Middletown didn’t collect from the utilities. It’s the $1.5 million hit the Township continues to take in reduced State Aid from 2009 levels. “We wouldn’t be increasing property taxes 1.97% this year if our Aid was restored,” said Fiore, “give us our $1.5 million back and I can reduce taxes by 2%. The Board of Education got all of their Aid restored, yet they are still raising taxes.”
Schneider told the APP that not receiving the energy receipts tax is costing Long Branch “several million dollars.”
New Jersey’s Supreme Court ruled last week that the cash-strapped state must send another $500 million in aid to urban school districts — the latest in a long series of decisions disconnected from economic reality and wise public policy.
Over the last 40 years, Jersey’s high court has commandeered tens of billions of dollars of state tax money that has largely been wasted on schools, forced taxes higher and undermined the tax base of whole communities — in the process, driving the state to the verge of insolvency.
Basing its original decision on a vague clause in the state Constitution that says the state must ensure “a thorough and efficient system of free public schools,” the court made the state responsible for funding urban school districts — regardless of whether the money was well spent.
Courts in other states, including New York, have interpreted similar language to mean that states should provide more aid to urban districts. But Jersey’s high court essentially ruled that schools in 31 poor “Abbott districts” should be funded at a level equal to the states’ wealth iest school districts — making Jersey’s among the most expensive urban school districts in America.
Newark spends $23,000 per pupil; Camden, $22,000; Asbury Park, $27,000. Most of that money comes from the state — 82 percent of Newark’s school budget, for instance.
So residents in many suburban towns essentially pay for two school systems: their own, through local property taxes, and urban schools, through their state taxes — costing state residents a staggering $37 billion since 1998, according to estimates in The New York Times.
Even if this spending produced stellar results, it would be hard to justify this system: The steep property taxes it requires have helped make homeownership unaffordable even to many middle-class residents. But the results have been the opposite of stellar. As the education reform group E3 observes in a study of Newark, “Money For Nothing”: “Given the extraordinary expenditure on schooling, students are not receiving a meaningful education.”
Despite claims that it wanted to ensure “thorough and efficient” schools, the court has done nothing but feed dollars to a patronage-laden Jersey political culture.
For example, when the court ruled that Jersey had to spend heavily to build schools in urban districts, the state floated billions of dollars of debt through a construction authority it created to get around the requirement that voters must approve all borrowing. The court not only allowed the scheme — but when the construction authority proved so corrupt and inefficient that it only finished half the job with the money it got, the court forced the state to spend billions more.
The court has also reshaped the state’s map with decisions known as the Mount Laurel cases, by taking local zoning powers away from towns and cities and requiring municipalities to build affordable housing, often at great cost.
In one infamous case, it ordered the tiny township of Greenwich, with only 520 housing units, to add 810 homes, sending property taxes soaring. The burden fell especially hard on middle-income residents; later court rulings gave big property-tax breaks to the lower-income units.
The latest ruling has spurred Gov. Chris Christie in his pledge to remake the Supreme Court. Last year, he outraged the state’s political establishment by refusing to renominate Justice John Wallace, breaking with a tradition in which Supreme Court justices are automatically reappointed. The Democratic-controlled Senate refused to consider Christie’s nominee for the job, allowing Chief Justice Stuart Rabner to appoint a temporary replacement judge, who was the key swing vote in the decision to spend $500 million more in school aid.
That’s money the state doesn’t have — Jersey can’t even afford to contribute to its severely underfunded state pension system.
New Yorkers, beware. In 2007, the Empire State agreed to boost state education spending by an unrealistic $7 billion over four years in response to a lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. But facing a $10 billion budget hole, Gov. Cuomo has cut education aid by $1.5 billion, prompting threats of another CFE lawsuit — even though New York still leads the nation in per-pupil spending.
The courts shouldn’t become a permanent substitute for our elected officials in managing state spending. As Jersey has taught us, when judges seize that power, taxpayers wind up big losers.
Steve Malanga is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; his new book is “Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer.”
Forty years of school finance litigation – and we still can’t agree what it means to provide a “thorough and efficient” system of public education. The latest Abbott v. Burke ruling didn’t distinguish between the two parts of New Jersey’s most famous constitutional phrase, but it seems unlikely we’ll ever get to thoroughness without efficiency. In the real world if not in the courts, there’s no separating the two, and it’s time for the legislature to give both their due.
The system for funding and operating our public schools is hopelessly wasteful: a fractured, Byzantine system that allows good money to be wasted on redundant programs and unnecessary bureaucracies. The problem lies with New Jersey’s overabundance of local government. With 566 municipalities and 616 school districts, we simply have too many administrative entities trying to do the same thing. New Jersey taxpayers elect mayors to govern towns with fewer than 25 residents and pay superintendants to oversee districts with fewer than 50 students.
The waste is remarkable. Consider Mendham, home of Gov. Chris Christie. It’s a single community, but the town is split into two local governments: Mendham Borough and Mendham Township. Each municipality has its own K-8 school district, each with fewer than 1,000 enrolled students and each with a superintendant making more than $150,000 per year. The two municipalities are also part of the West Morris Regional High School District, which includes Chester Township, Chester Borough, and Washington Township, and which pays its own superintendant $192,000 per year to watch over the five towns’ high school kids.
It’s an elaborate – and expensive – mess. It’s no surprise that, at a spring 2009 town hall meeting, Christie called the divide between the two Mendhams “crazy.”
There’s a better way. Representatives from the Mendhams, the Chesters, and Washington Township are discussing several cost-saving measures, including a consolidation of the various school districts and, more boldly, a consolidation of the five municipalities. A recent study commissioned by Courage to Connect NJ, the only statewide non-partisan, non-profit organization devoted to consolidation and shared services, found that multi-town municipal consolidations could lower property taxes by up to 40 percent in some cases.
The real question is whether Christie and the State Legislature are committed to fixing the problem. The state’s fiscal 2010 budget eliminated virtually all funding to study consolidating municipalities and other local districts. Now that Trenton must come up with an additional $500 million to comply with Abbott, it’s going to be even harder to convince politicians that consolidation is worthy of additional funding. But a small increase in state funding for consolidation could save tremendous amounts of money in the future – and make it easier for New Jersey to provide the “thorough and efficient” system of education that the state constitution requires.
A good first step would be to reform the way that New Jersey funds consolidation studies. Across the state, there are scores of local officials and grassroots community groups that want to know whether their towns could save money and lower taxes by merging local governments or school districts with neighboring communities. But these studies require towns to shell out between $30,000 and $70,000 for private outside consultants to perform relevant financial analyses. State law obligates Trenton to help towns defray the cost of these studies, but it has long since given up funding these projects. Cash-strapped towns wind up abandoning study proposals because they can’t afford the up-front cost.
The solution is simple: Trenton should take over the study process. Remove private “consultants” and assign two or three non-partisan experts in municipal finance to examine the various proposed consolidations – which they could do for far less than $30,000 to $70,000 per study. At long last, weary taxpayers can finally figure out if consolidation is the answer.
Making it easier to consolidate towns and schools won’t magically solve our budget problems. But a short-term investment now will help communities find new ways to fund local services – including public education – without bankrupting taxpayers. More money for New Jersey’s schools won’t do any good unless we create a system that is both thorough and efficient. Here’s hoping Trenton makes the best of this opportunity.
Andrew Bruck is a former law clerk to Chief Justice Stuart Rabner. He is the co-author of the Courage to Connect NJ Guidebook, a citizen’s guide to municipal consolidation in New Jersey, and “Overruled by Home Rule,” a legal and historical overview of consolidation.
Governor Chris Christie and Senate President Steve Sweeney announced that they had reached a compromise over the nomination of Anne Patterson to the NJ Supreme Court.
Christie nominated Patterson to the court one year ago today to fill the seek of John Wallace. Wallace’s term was expiring but he had not reached the age of mandatory retirement. Christie acted within his constitutional authority but broke with tradition by not reappointing Wallace.
Christie’s Democratic critics, in the legislature and the media, charged that the governor was interfering with the independence of the judiciary. Christie countered that he was fulfilling his campaign promise to reshape the court which has a long history of overstepping its bounds and legislating from the bench, especially with the Abbott decision which mandates education spending and the Mt. Laurel decision which mandates the development of affordable housing. These two judicial decisions are responsible for New Jersey’s highest in the nation property taxes.
Sweeney pledged that Patterson would not get a hearing in the Senate and that her nomination would not be voted on until Wallace, who hails from Sweeney’s home county of Gloucester, reached the age of retirement; March of 2012. For a year the Wallace seat has filled by appellate Judge Edwin Stern who was appointed by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner as a temporary fill-in.
As a result of the “compromise” announced yesterday between Christie and Sweeney, the governor will withdraw Patterson’s nomination to Wallace seat and nominate her for the seat of retiring Justice Roberto Rivera-Sota. Sweeney pledged a fair hearing for Patterson, and that timely hearings will be held for the Wallace seat and the seat of
Justice Virginia Long who reaches the mandatory retirement age in 2012.
I fail to see the “deal” here. Where’s the compromise? What did Christie get? Christie could have withdrawn Patterson’s nomination for Wallace’s seat and nominated her for Rivera-Soto’s seat without consulting Sweeney. Sweeney keeps the Wallace seat filled by Stern until March. Was Sweeney threatening to hold up the nominations to replace Wallace and Long beyond their retirement dates? Would Sweeney allow three seats on the seven member court to be held by temporary Justices appointed by Rabner?
The other thing I don’t like about this deal capitulation, is that it is an indication that Christie assumes that Sweeney will be Senate President next year. While that may be a realistic expectation given the new gerrymandered legislative map, it is disappointing to think that Christie, as the leader of the Republican party, has already given up on trying to win control of the Senate in the legislative election this November.
If Christie has given up on winning control of the Senate, who am I to argue that it is possible?
By Harold Kane, Monroe Township (Written as a Letter to the Editor of The Star Ledger)
The Star Ledger never misses a chance to take cheap shots at politicians.
In the February 27thPERSPECTIVE Mark Magyar insinuated that New Jersey’s property tax issues are the fault of Christie. He fails to mention that Christie has been in office for one year and that New Jersey’s public sector exploded under Governors Jim McGreevy, Dick Codey, and Jon Corzine. During the past ten years, while NJs population grew 4.5%, * property taxes increased by 85%**. This was done to pay the compensation of the army of public employees that were hired by NJs 2,000 municipalities, counties, school boards, fire districts, water and sewer districts and community colleges, with the worst year being 2003 when 17,000 ***new public employees were hired under McGreevy.
The Democrats from 2001 to 2010 bloated up the public workforce for their own purposes-the larger the workforce, the larger the public unions, subsequently the more campaign money given to the Democrats. Christie is trying to do what needs to be done to bring fiscal sanity to NJ, working against a hostile legislature. If the Star Ledger would like to be part of the solution to New Jersey’s fiscal problems then they should endorse Republican candidates in October so that Governor Christie will have the Republican legislature that he needs.
Loch Arbour is .1 square mile and home to 196 people, according to the 2010 U.S. census. The metropolis of Allenhurst in three times the size of of Loch Arbour by land mass, but has a much lower population density of 496 residents per the most recent census. Should the towns merge, they would form a municipality just south of Deal, the 1.3 square mile borough that is home to 750 year round residents.
Obviously, it is not municipal spending that is prompting the 196 Loch Arbourians to give up their sovereignty. It is school spending.