Impact of reval will become clear in ’07
New school, town budgets must be approved before real bottom line is known
BY KATHY BARATTA
Staff Writer

The recently completed property revaluation of 14,720 taxable properties in Manalapan resulted in 700 property owners requesting an appeal of the new assessment they received.

Manalapan Tax Assessor Sharon Hartman said informal hearings for these appeals were conducted from Nov. 1 through Nov. 30. She said a letter will be going out to each resident who appealed in order to apprise them of the final decision and the final new assessment on their property.

Hartman said any reduction in the initial assessment would be the result of officials looking at all of the properties surrounding any individual appeal and any reduction would be made for the whole neighborhood and not just the individual who appealed.

Manalapan’s last revaluation was in 1991.

Monmouth County Tax Administrator Matthew S. Clark has explained that revaluations are necessary to ensure parity among all taxpayers, meaning the tax burden is evenly distributed among 100 percent of the tax base.

In a property revaluation, a representative of the company hired to conduct the work visits every property in the municipality and determines the current market value of each parcel.

The taxes a property owner pays to support school and government operations is determined by multiplying the assessed value of the property by tax rates established by each taxing authority (municipality, county, Manal-apan-Englishtown Regional School District, Freehold Regional High School District and fire district).

Manalapan property owners currently pay a total of $3.69 per $100 of assessed valuation, according to Hartman.

For example, the owner of a home assessed at $200,000 currently pays about $7,380 in annual property taxes. The owner of a home assessed at $800,000 currently pays about $29,520 in annual property taxes.

The revaluation “is not to increase the amount collected, but to distribute the tax load fairly throughout the town,” Hartman explained.

She said the revaluations of Manalapan properties completed by the Vital appraisal company were based on market values that were effective Oct. 1. Hartman said the municipality’s new ratable base going into the new budget will be more than double that of last year, so that means the overall tax rate can be expected to be reduced by half.

In a perfect world, said Hartman, that overall reduction would translate into individual reductions per taxpayer, however, as costs for everything continue to rise and there is no way to know what the new school and municipal budgets will be, there is no way to assess as yet what the revaluation will translate into when it comes down to dollars and cents per taxpayer.

Hartman acknowledged that the taxes paid on some properties will increase, the taxes paid on some properties will decrease and the taxes paid on some properties will remain about the same.

She said when all is said and done, it could turn out that an individual who paid between $800,000 and $1 million for a new home in the past year could see his property tax bill decrease if his home’s value had not been “raised significantly” during the revaluation process.

“The purpose of the reval is to redistribute the amount of taxes collected — to distribute them fairly,” Hartman said.

Using Hartman’s projection of Manalapan’s overall tax rate being cut in half as a result of the revaluation (from $3.69 to about $1.85 per $100 of assessed valuation), the owner of a home that was previously assessed at $200,000 and is now assessed at $500,000 would see an increase in his total property tax from $7,380 to $9,250.

The owner of a home that was previously assessed at $800,000 and is now assessed at $1 million would see a decrease in his total property tax from $29,520 to $18,500.

Hartman could not outline the criteria Vital’s appraisers use when preparing a revaluation assessment.

A reporter attempting to obtain those criteria from Vital was told the information could only be released by the firm’s president who was not available for comment and did not grant an interview request.