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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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FYI, I was doing some research on 99 Hudson Street and found information that suggests what downtown assessments could be after the reval.
The official assessment for 99 Hudson Street's land (all 1.7 acres) is $6.8 million, but the land was sold in 2011 by Bank of America to Hartz Mountain for $35 million and then sold again in 2013 by Hartz Mountain to China Overseas America for $68 million. It seems to me that the official assessment is not even a tenth of the real market value. This is a much worse ratio of assessment to real value than Jersey City's's average. http://tax1.co.monmouth.nj.us/cgi-bin ... 614507____00001_________M https://www.cpexecutive.com/post/99-hu ... -be-njs-tallest-building/ This is important because it suggests just how badly undertaxed downtown is and overtaxed some outlying neighborhoods of Jersey City are. It's also important because PILOTs (which are concentrated downtown) are usually only given on the improvement and not the underlying land. This means that when the reval comes and the land underneath the PILOTed skyscrapers is reassessed Jersey City's PILOTed buildings will begin to pay significantly higher taxes, although not nearly what they would pay if there were no PILOTs. dtjcview, You're right, the reval, state aid, and PILOTs are separate problems, although they aren't completely independent and if a thread goes off-topic in an informative way, I don't think that's necessarily such a bad thing.
Posted on: 2016/2/3 15:23
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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Locked into a $72 million contribution?
I don't know what Bret Schundler meant here, Schundler was speaking during the "peak Abbott" years around 2000. At the time the Abbotts gained hundreds of millions a year and Jersey City's aid rose in absolute terms and as a percentage of the overall state aid distribution. From 1998-1999 to 1999-2000, for instance, Jersey City gained $75 million. (that wasn't typical). At that time it might have seemed like Jersey City would never need to raise its school tax levy although that would be a pretty short-sighted view even then. Anyhow, SFRA nominally preserves Jersey City's K-12 aid at $418 million indefinitely, but, as I said, that amount is endangered by the state's overall budget crisis and acute need in other districts.
Posted on: 2016/2/1 20:25
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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JCGuys,
Yes, a municipality can structure a PILOT so that the municipality gets more revenue than it would from regular taxation. I'm sure that in a hot real estate market it's easy for a municipality to get a developer to agree to a high-municipal payment PILOT. So the presentation you linked to is accurate in its claim about higher municipal revenue from certain PILOT agreements, but the presentation has a lot of bullsh*t in it too 1. The presentation suggests that PILOTing has made JC home values outpace national growth in home values. Yeah right. JC's home values and economy are doing well because it's right next to Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens values are escalating too. Many towns in NJ that have train lines have also done well. 2. The presentation claims that it's a "myth" that "just Jersey City" uses PILOTs. Umm, this is a straw man. No informed person believes that literally "just" Jersey City uses PILOTs. Yes, lots of towns use them, but not nearly to the extent that Jersey City does. http://www.nj.gov/comptroller/news/docs/tax_abatement_report.pdf Towns whose school systems are locally funded cannot politically get away with so much PILOTing. It would be cannibalization since the local BOE would lose a future revenue source but still get its money from non-PILOTed taxpayers. Towns like Newark and Paterson, whose schools are also mostly state funded, just don't have the developer interest despite their willingness to provide PILOTs. The presentation says "Not using this tool would place Jersey City at a competitive disadvantage" but Newark and Paterson can say to developers interested in Jersey City "LOOK OVER HERE WE'LL PILOT YOUR BUILDING" and still very few developers will take on the Newark and Paterson risk even with a large tax abatement. (hence those places having so many buildings that are vacant above the first storey.) 3. The presentation talks about more municipal revenue but ignores the overall loss of revenue to JC-entities if you factor in the loss of school taxes. Not everything is the JC City Council's fault though. They are just responding to a bad incentive system. The long-term PILOT law itself is just dumbly written. The tax cut reduction should be in equal proportions to the county, school district, and municipality. I can't fathom why the designers of the law designed it so that all the sacrifice came from the county and school district *The county gets 5% of PILOT revenue, although this is a relatively recent change. ** Usually the land value is not PILOTed. So even though Goldman Sachs pays no regular taxes on its 30 Hudson Street building, it pays $261,000 on the land (based on a $3.5 million land assessment.) http://tax1.co.monmouth.nj.us/cgi-bin ... 614502____00012_________M
Posted on: 2016/2/1 17:18
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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?stateaidguy, that was fascinating, thanks. For once, Yvonne's hobbyhorse of abatements might be relevant to the discussion, as the most expensive properties in the city are not contributing their share to the schools. I remember some talk of the PILOT's being distributed differently giving a portion to the schools, but don't know it it came to fruition. Do you have a POV on this??
I?m flattered you would ask this. In a sense PILOTing is more of a tax issue than a school budget issue. This is because a BOE technically sets a tax levy, not a tax rate. A BOE gives a tax rate to the public, but the rate is purely for informational purposes since the tax levy determines the tax rate, not the other way around. Whatever (legal) tax levy a BOE sets it gets. The tax apportionment among taxpayers is automatically done by the tax assessor. If a tax-paying building is demolished to build a PILOTed building (or a tax-paying building is bought by a non-profit) then the taxes formerly paid are silently transferred to other taxpayers. If a new building is built in a town and starts to pay $1 million in school taxes it doesn?t mean that the BOE gets more money either; all it means is that every other taxpayer?s taxes are reduced by $1 million. If a non-profit buys a building that formerly paid $1 million in taxes then everyone else?s taxes automatically increase by $1 million. So when 99 Hudson Street (which isn?t PILOTed) opens and starts to pay school taxes it doesn?t mean that the JCBOE will have a cent more unless it also decides to increase the tax levy. Over the last decade Jersey City?s Equalized Valuation has more than doubled, from $10 billion to $21 billion, but the tax levy hasn?t increased proportionally because the JC BOE hasn?t increased the tax levy by nearly as much (and now is constrained by the tax cap anyway) (At the opposite extreme is Atlantic City. Atlantic City?s tax base has collapsed; dropping from $19.7 billion in 2007 in $11 billion in 2014. And yet Atlantic City?s school tax levy did not drop until 2015-16 because the Atlantic City BOE did not reduce the tax levy until this year.) People, including 2013 candidate Steve Fulop, say that PILOTing ?robs? the schools of money, but that?s technically not true. PILOTing robs other taxpayers who have to pay a disproportionate share of the tax burden. PILOTing makes the tax base smaller than it would be otherwise, so that means it?s politically harder for a BOE to raise taxes, but the JCBOE isn?t increasing taxes by the maximum amount allowed anyway. In most towns in NJ PILOTed property is a tiny fraction of the overall valuation (like 1% or less). In Jersey City it?s at least 30% of the valuation. That means that 70% of the property in Jersey City pay for 100% of the local school tax levy. The reason PILOTing hasn?t been more controversial is that the state pays for 75% of Jersey City?s schools anyway. However, as the state percentage drops and JC?s school taxes increase PILOTing should become more controversial. Many people, including State Comptroller Matthew Boxer, Sen. Mike Doherty, and me have criticized PILOTing because it distorts state aid by ?hiding? a city?s true tax wealth from the formula for Equalization Aid. However, the distortion of state aid would remain due to the mechanism of Adjustment Aid. If all of JC?s PILOTs expired tomorrow all that would happen is that Jersey City?s Equalization Aid (Equalization Aid is intended to help poor districts) would be converted into Adjustment Aid and the total aid package would remain at $418 million for K-12. Brewster, You?re right, state aid and PILOTing is a distraction, although don?t threads go off-topic pretty often anyway? I think the county is more to blame than the state, since the county tax board has the power to order reassessments. The lack of reassessments has only occurred in three counties: Union, Middlesex, and Hudson. However, since JC has a lot of weight within Hudson County a lot of the blame just bounces back to Jersey City.
Posted on: 2016/2/1 14:58
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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The reval itself isn't going to mean that Jersey City loses any state aid for its schools, although I think there is an indirect link.
NJ's school funding law, SFRA, technically protects Jersey City's state aid at ~$418 million forever due to a provision called "Adjustment Aid" which stipulates that no district can receive less than 102% of what it received before SFRA became law in 2008. In theory the Adjustment Aid provision means that Jersey City can NEVER lose aid no matter how wealthy it becomes. Hence Hoboken never losing state aid even though Hoboken has double the property wealth per student as Millburn and Princeton. HOWEVER, SFRA was based on some wildly wrong assumptions about growing state revenue. The idea of SFRA was that every Abbott district could keep its Abbott status and special rights, but that every other poor and working class district in NJ would essentially be "Abbottized" with very high aid for K-12 and universal Pre-K for 3 and 4 year olds. Obviously this would cost a billions, but in 2008 the legislature and Corzine pretended that NJ would just have billions and billions more to spend on education. Since 2008 the state's revenue has fallen dramatically and still not fully recovered. We've also awoken to the pension crisis which means that all new state revenue goes into pensions, not education. This means that the districts that were underaided in 2008 haven't gotten what they were promised and some of these districts have seen tremendous population growth and student impoverishment. The worst situation is Freehold Boro, where school buildings built to accommodate 1100 kids are forced to accommodate 1700 kids. In taxes, the worst situation is Manchester Regional, where the taxpayers pay 177% of Local Fair Share and the schools are still way under Adequacy. However, there are hundreds of districts that are underaided and 50 that have aid deficits greater than $4,000 a student. (On Freehold Boro http://www.app.com/story/news/local/w ... -changing-faces/72061642/ ) FYI: Bayonne is underaided by $50 million. Kearny is underaided by $31 million. Guttenberg is underaided by $8 million (which is $6300 per student, the 6th largest deficit in NJ.) The desperation of many other districts means that Adjustment Aid will be reduced and (hopefully) eliminated in order for that money to be given to districts with the most acute needs. Steven Sweeney and David Hespe themselves have said so. The old commissioner of education, Chris Cerf, has said so. Despite SFRA being the state's aid law, any budget the legislature passes is automatically legal. The executive branch dominates the budget process. The questions on the state aid future are 1. whether or not districts that are below Adequacy will lose Adjustment Aid or only districts that are above Adequacy will lose Adjustment Aid. (Jersey City is overaided, but it significantly below Adequacy because its taxes are so low.) 2. how quickly the reductions will happen. Again, even in a best case scenario in which SFRA is followed to the letter, Jersey City will never gain state aid for decades. A major problem for the JCPS is that 2% of its existing Local Tax Levy is $2.8 million ($2.8 million = 2% of $114 million.) Jersey City's schools have a $560 million budget. Even conservatively they should increase spending by $12 million a year to avoid cuts, but $12 million is a 10% tax increase for JC and that's not politically possible, even though it's economically possible. It certainly isn't possible if the outdated property assessment means that there are Jersey Cityans who are paying 2x what they should be paying. I don't know if any Jersey City politicians get this about education funding and the necessity to have large local tax increases just to sustain services. Send me a quote if you can find a JC elected official who says that the schools will be flat-funded by the state forever and that local taxes have increase by an amount that is huge in proportion to the existing tax levy. Anyway, to let JC sustain its schools with its own local dollars (like it has to) the reval has to happen or else people with overassessed properties will get wiped out. The state probably realizes this. Sen. Mike Doherty realizes this. Steve Fulop doesn't realize this. He doesn't realize how JC's schools taxes have to increase and since they are going to increase they have to fall on the property owners best able to pay those taxes. The reval and state aid are technically independent, but it is possible to see the reval and fairer local taxation allowing Jersey City to pay a much higher school tax levy.
Posted on: 2016/2/1 2:11
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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Agustin Torres is trying so hard to be even-handed in his Fulop essay that he misses some important contextual facts (or doesn't know them)
"Jersey City's situation is not unique. It's not like it isn't the only municipality that waited and waited. Remember Newark when it reached some 40 years without a reval? Now with the state ? which has allowed these situations to fester and is as much to blame ? involved, a reval is certain." Most of the other towns in NJ that haven't done revals (and all the long-delayers are in Middlesex, Union, and Hudson Counties) have had more uniform growth and therefore very few property owners are being taxed unfairly. This consistency of growth shows up in having low Coefficients of Deviation, which is the statistical measure of assessment variability. Edison, which has also gone decades without a reval and whose assessment is a small fraction of its Equalized Valuation, has a Coefficient of Deviation of 12%. This means for Edison that the lack of a Reval doesn't really matter since properties sell for basically the same ratio from their official assessments. Jersey City's Coefficient of Deviation is 39% - the state's highest. This means that properties are selling at very different ratios from their official assessments.
Posted on: 2016/1/30 17:12
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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"The article said this will be the only public hearing so I suspect the decision has already been made and this is just for show. Let people vent and feel like they had an opportunity to" The state is basing its demand for Jersey City to reassess based on Jersey City' huge divergence between assessed valuation and true valuation (aka, Equalized Valuation) and Jersey City's largest-in-NJ Coefficient of Deviation. http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/20 ... rty-taxes-are-states.html I agree, the decision to order the reassessment will be made independently of whatever people say tomorrow night, but this isn't necessarily bad governance because Jersey City's markers of property tax unfairness are so high and because the crowd tomorrow night will likely not be representative of the city as a whole.
Posted on: 2016/1/27 16:48
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Re: Jersey City mayor-elect orders end to citywide reval
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FYI, Jersey City's Coefficient of Deviation is the highest in New Jersey.
Towns are supposed to reassess when their coefficient of deviation exceeds 15%. There are only Of 560+ municipalities, there are only 27 that exceed 20% and only two that exceed 30%. Jersey City's Coefficient of Deviation for 2015 is 39%. http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/20 ... rty-taxes-are-states.html
Posted on: 2015/11/30 19:07
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Re: Explanation of abatements
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Quote:
My point isn't that Jersey City should have to pay the full $335 million in local fair share, although there are almost 200 towns in New Jersey that do pay 100% of LFS or higher. My point certainly isn't that Jersey City should pay its full Local Fair Share overnight. My point is simply that Jersey City has the economic ability to pay much more than a $114 million school levy and the state needs to devise an orderly way to free up the aid going to Jersey City so that it can be available for districts with much more acute budget problems (who are poor and working class districts like Bayonne, Kearny, and Clifton and NOT affluent suburbs) Yes, charter school transfers are a fiscal problem for the JCPS, although some charter schools in Jersey City have a counternarrative about how _they_ are the ones being treated unfairly due to quirks in how Adjustment Aid is transferred to charters. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/15 ... e-charter-school-funding/ http://www.njspotlight.com/tables/tge15/#/c03/HUDSON Something I don't think is well understood in Jersey City is that even if SFRA were fully funded Jersey City wouldn't gain any aid for decades. This means that unless SFRA is ignored or rewritten (and I don't know how it would be rewritten in JC's favor), all the new money from the JCPS has to come from local sources. The Total Operating Budget of the JCPS is $565 million. Assuming very conservatively that the JCPS budget should increase by 2%, this means that the JCPS budget should increase by $11 million just to avoid cuts. The JCPS can't keep raising the tax levy by only 2% if it wants to sustain educational quality. 2% of the $114 million tax levy is only $3 million, so this means that 2% tax increases are not sustainable. Jersey City is already $2900 per student Below Adequacy and unlike most other towns that are so far Below Adequacy, the gap is entirely because of undertaxing, not underaiding. The JCBOE, Steve Fulop, and the City Council need to have a strategy for getting an affirmative vote from the Jersey City electorate for a larger tax increase than 2% or else a change in the tax cap law so a district that is significantly below Local Fair Share can go above 2.0% without a vote from the electorate. I'm sure that Jersey City's reassessment will be contentious (even though only a minority will see a tax increase because of reassessment), but at least Jersey City knows what to expect. When it comes to how the school budget, state aid, and tax cap interact and the need to go way above 2% I don't think many in Jersey City know what is going to happen.
Posted on: 2015/11/24 2:26
Edited by stateaidguy on 2015/11/24 2:53:58
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Re: Explanation of abatements
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Quote:
I don't know if you mean the "city government is in no position to make a significant increase in its contribution to the school district" or "Jersey City taxpayers are no position to make a significant increase in its contribution to the school district," but if you mean the latter you are not correct. NJ has a formula to determine how much tax money a district can pay towards it schools. It is called "Local Fair Share" and consists of 50% Equalized Valuation and 50% Total Income. Jersey City's LFS is $335 million and will go up even more next year due to the increases in Equalized Valuation and income. Jersey City's actual tax levy is only $114 million. This means that Jersey City pays only a third of its LFS. The average district in NJ pays 80% of its LFS. Even Newark pays 62% of its LFS. Jersey City can thus contribute A LOT more to its schools. What the JCBOE doesn't realize is that it is going to have to do this. SFRA (NJ's school aid law) is badly underfunded, but even if it were fully funded Jersey City would not gain any aid because it is already dramatically overaided. This means that the best case aid scenario for JC is flat aid, although aid cuts are more likely. This means that the JCBOE will have to ask the JC electorate at some time in the near future to go above the 2% cap. Jersey City's PILOTs are a problem, but the JC BOE refuses to raise taxes as much as the cap allows anyway even though JC has a large annual increase in Equalized Valuation anyway. The tax cap law has adjustments for health insurance, pop growth, and a few other things giving BOEs the ability to raise taxes by more than 2.0%. The JCBOE has not done this. In fact a few years ago the tax increase was less than 2.0%.
Posted on: 2015/11/22 2:59
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Re: Explanation of abatements
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I see more sensitivity here about Jersey City's state aid than I've heard before from you, but you are not correct that "the loudest complainers about the school funding formula are suburbs." Maybe you realize that I am from the suburbs and I condemn NJ's aid distribution, but the loudest complaints are from savagely underaided poor non-Abbots. This is about a forceful protest from Prospect Park about how ripped off they are by the state. (Prospect Park has an aid deficit over $8000 per student.) http://www.northjersey.com/news/prosp ... school-tax-hike-1.1309809 This is about Teresa Ruiz, Steve Sweeney visiting Freehold Boro to talk about Pre-K and instead meeting furious complaints about how ripped off Freehold Boro is. (Freehold Bori is also underaided by over $8000 a student.) http://www.nj.com/monmouth/index.ssf/ ... chool_overcrowding_u.html This is about Clifton's anger at being underaided by over $4000 a student when hundreds of districts are in fact overaided. http://www.northjersey.com/news/educa ... unding-question-1.1423553 I could go on of anger from very poor towns. The battle over state aid, which has yet to really begin, is between overaided districts against underaided districts. Jersey City is overaided by $111 million, but not all Abbotts are overaided at all and you don't see me criticizing their aid, do you? This is not suburb vs city, it is (partly) Gentrified Abbott vs still poor non-Abbott. njeducationaid.blogspot.com
Posted on: 2015/11/22 2:50
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Re: Will Jersey City and Hoboken ever lose Abbott District Status?
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I'm not sure of all the mechanics for calculating Equalized Valuation, but they look at the previous year's real estate sales and then compare the sale values to the official, appraisals. If houses on average sell for 3x their assessed values then a town's Equalized Valuation would be 3x its official assessment. This is called the "assessment-sales ratio program." http://www.njslom.org/tax_brochure.html
Posted on: 2015/10/22 22:30
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Re: Will Jersey City and Hoboken ever lose Abbott District Status?
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The numbers you have on Hoboken are out of date. In 2013-2014, the most recent year for which I have data, the Hoboken schools are only 49% FRL-eligible. This is only the 96th highest in New Jersey. FRL-eligibility is not the same thing as being in poverty either - you can be at 185% of the poverty line to qualify for reduced lunch and 130% of the poverty line for free lunch. Less than 1% of Hoboken students are ELLs, an extremely low figure. The state average is 5%. http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/20 ... cally-hoboken-has-no.html However, even if 100% of Hoboken students were in deep poverty Hoboken would still not economically be justified as an Abbott since its property base is so immense in relation to its student body. Hoboken only has 2600 students, but its tax base is the 4th highest in NJ. In terms of tax base per student, Hoboken is twice as wealthy as Princeton and Millburn.
Posted on: 2015/10/22 22:17
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Re: Will Jersey City and Hoboken ever lose Abbott District Status?
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@dtjcview
I agree with you on JC needing a reval, but the Equalized Valuation and the assessed valuation are separate figures. Equalized Valuation is calculated annually by the county tax assessor and is supposed to be the market valuation of all the taxable real estate in a city. Equalized Valuation is used to apportion county taxes and school taxes in regional school districts. A town in NJ is suppose to do a reval whenever its general assessment drops below 85% of Equalized Valuation, but there are places where this doesn't happen, like Jersey City. Jersey City's assessed valuation is 27.6% of its Equalized Valuation, one of the ten biggest gaps in NJ. http://www.state.nj.us/treasury/taxation/lpt/lptvalue.shtml Equalized Valuation is supposed to be used to calculate state aid in NJ for underaided districts, but this legal requirement is ignored. (overaided districts are supposed to automatically get 102% of what they got before SFRA through "Adjustment Aid" but many districts have not recovered from the 2009-2011 cuts.) You might like this post about changes in EV in NJ's biggest cities. http://njeducationaid.blogspot.com/20 ... s-of-new-jerseys-big.html
Posted on: 2015/10/21 15:32
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Re: Will Jersey City and Hoboken ever lose Abbott District Status?
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Thank you to anyone who read my blog about NJ Education Aid, especially the posts about Jersey City.
Regarding whether or not Jersey City has an "excessive tax burden," EVERYONE in New Jersey thinks that they pay excessive taxes and many people actually do pay excessive taxes. Jersey City, objectively and relatively speaking, does not have excessive taxes in terms of taxes per equalized valuation or taxes per dollar of income. Jersey City's all-in, effective tax rate (county, schools, municipality, other entities) is 2.291, is just average for New Jersey. Jersey City's all-in taxes are low compared to most of the other Abbotts though. Jersey City's school taxes, however, are very low. The state average school tax rate is about 1.0, but JC's is 0.58. More importantly, Jersey City pays less than one third of its its Local Fair Share. Jersey City's Local Fair Share is $336 million, but its Local Tax Levy for 15-16 is only $114 million. Even though JC has, by far, the highest equalized valuation in NJ (over $20 billion for FY 2016), it only has the 17th highest school taxes. Much smaller districts like Cherry Hill, East Brunswick, West Orange, Clifton, South Orange-Maplewood, and Wayne have higher local tax levies even though their Equalized Valuations and Total Incomes are much lower. Demographically Jersey City is still an Abbott, although its FRL-eligible percentage is only the 41st highest in NJ and there are quite a few non-Abbotts with higher FRL-eligible rates. HOWEVER, it's important to note that Jersey City has a proportionally smaller student population than most other districts, so the fact that 71% of its student population is FRL-eligible doesn't automatically mean it should still be an Abbott and Jersey City has had substantial ratable group. Jersey City is an average resource district in terms of taxing ability but it has a student population that is still poor. I don't want to see Jersey City lose all or most of its aid, but, for the sake of NJ's many poorer districts, SOME REDISTRIBUTION HAS TO HAPPEN, some means-testing has to be applied for Pre-K, and JC has to begin to pay for a proportion of its capital projects. Hoboken is a different story from Jersey City, although I often group them together along with Asbury Park as the three worst examples of aid hoarding. Hoboken is NJ's wealthiest district in per pupil terms. Hoboken, a city of 52,000, only has 2,600 kids. Hoboken's Equalized Valuation is$ $13.3 billion, tied with Newark for NJ's 4th highest. Hoboken's Local Fair Share per student is $187 million, which is more than half of Jersey City's. In per pupil terms, Hoboken has DOUBLE what Millburn and Princeton have. Hoboken should lose all of its aid. It wouldn't matter if 100% of Hoboken's kids were in abject poverty since Hoboken has immense local resources. It is disgusting that Hoboken gets $20 million a year for Pre-K and K-12. Most kids in poverty in non-Abbotts get nothing for Pre-K so how can the Education Law Center, Hoboken BOE, and NJ Supreme Court insist that the kids of lawyers and i-bankers in Hoboken get Pre-K for "free" because Hoboken was poor back in 1986?
Posted on: 2015/10/21 1:02
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