Countywide Assessment Splits Atlantic County Officials

By MICHELLE BRUNETTI POST, Staff Writer

Atlantic County officials are at odds over starting a countywide property tax assessment program, even though they agree one is needed as casino industry troubles push property values down and tax appeals up.

The freeholders urged the administration this week to institute a plan that leaves municipal assessors in their jobs, but adds a county staff of five field workers and a supervisor to collect data on properties.

But County Executive Dennis Levinson, a Republican, said he can't support the plan without state legislation giving some control on valuation to the county.

The freeholders’ plan would allow the towns to constantly update assessments, and relieve municipalities of the expense of doing revaluations every five to 10 years, said Republican Freeholder John Risley, who led the committee that developed the plan.

Revaluations can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to well over $1 million, he said.

“The function in valuation stays with the local assessor,” said Somers Point Tax Assessor Diane Hesley, the Association of Municipal Assessors of New Jersey's Atlantic County president, who was on Risley’s committee. “The county is not taking over but providing a service to the towns.”

That’s the problem, said Levinson. The county will be paying about $400,000 a year for staff, but gaining no control over the actual assessments. Overvaluations could continue, along with huge numbers of tax appeals, he said.

Most tax appeals are handled by the county Board of Taxation. Appeals take up a great deal of staff time, and the county must make substantial refunds when appeals are successful. Towns must also make those refunds.

This year more than 10,000 property tax appeals have been filed in Atlantic County, about 6,000  of which concern property in Atlantic City, said Assistant to the County Tax Administrator Keith Szendrey. That’s up from about 750 in 2007, with just 133 in Atlantic City.

Under the freeholders’ plan, the county staff would feed information to local assessors, who would constantly update information on properties, so they could keep values close to 100 percent.

“This will make the system more fair, so everyone is only paying their appropriate share of taxes based on up-to-date assessments,” said Risley.

The way things are now, municipalities are spending large amounts of money to hire revaluation firms, and are still facing tax appeals.

“Egg Harbor Township just spent $1.3 million to do their reval, and the numbers are still changing rapidly in values,” Risley said. “They are changing dramatically and changing downward.”

After spending all that money, after six months or a year, “the numbers are not worth the paper they are written on,” he said.

The county plan would replace expensive revaluations, he said, and enable values to change immediately rather than waiting for a revaluation.

Levinson said the freeholder plan has merit, but he couldn’t support it in its current form.

“For us to get ourselves involved it would have to have some type of force or hammer behind it,” said Levinson.

“I gave it to (County Administrator Jerry DelRosso) to look over and come back and report on the plan the freeholder committee put together,” Levinson said. “We believe this has to be done by legislative action.”

DelRosso said one possibility would be state legislation to require the local assessors to report to the county Board of Taxation and follow the directive of the county board.

Monmouth and Gloucester counties are in the midst of trying their own forms of countywide assessment. Gloucester eliminated local assessors and took over the job with its own staff, while Monmouth continued to work with local assessors.
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