bodhipooh wrote:
Quote:

stateaidguy wrote:
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.

If you are correct, and I have no reason to doubt your claim based on the knowledge and understanding you have shown with your posts, I would say this is very, very interesting. Residents in newly-constructed, tax abated properties are often sold on the idea that their taxes are pretty much set on stone and that their abatements essentially protects/shields them from any future revaluation.

stateaidguy wrote:
Ok, I got the answer about land revals from a bona fide expert and PILOTs and it isn't what I assumed.

Land taxes and a PILOT payment interact. The total PILOT+land tax payment has to equal a previously agreed-upon sum.

So if a reval happens and the land taxes increase, the owner indeed will pay more in land taxes to the county+schools+municipality, but that extra amount is subtracted from the PILOT payment that would have gone to the municipality.

So when the reval happens GS and other downtown PILOT owners will pay more in land taxes and that'll be good for the schools and Hudson County, but the Jersey City municipality will lose some money it would have gotten absent a reval.

stateaidguy, you mentioned that abatements are usually only given on the improvement and not the underlying land. What are the instances where the land can also be abated? Do you know of any recent developments within Jersey City that has also had their land abated?

bodhipooh wrote:
Quote:

stateaidguy wrote:
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.

If you are correct, and I have no reason to doubt your claim based on the knowledge and understanding you have shown with your posts, I would say this is very, very interesting. Residents in newly-constructed, tax abated properties are often sold on the idea that their taxes are pretty much set on stone and that their abatements essentially protects/shields them from any future revaluation.

stateaidguy wrote:
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.

Yvonne wrote:
dtjcview, I am telling you what happened, look up public documents on the amount of money JC gives to the board of ed. Perhaps our public documents and have the newspaper articles when Cucci spoke before the city about Colgate. I do remember the councilman from Ward B became angry when Cucci wanted to give Colgate a tax abatement. Development was happening in the 1980s without long term tax abatements. Look at Dixon Mills as an example. They never received a 20 or 30 year tax abatement.

dtjcview wrote:
Neither the county nor the city have a financial incentive to make the reval happen. That's the issue. That's why there needs to be a mandate from the state.

Yvonne wrote:
Let me explain what happened. Gerry McCann was mayor, then he spelled his name with a G, now he uses a J, but I am getting off the subject. The city portion was $90 million in 1989. Gerry McCann wanted to cut the budget. He did this many time during his first term. In fact, when he left office in 1985, the state accused JC of shorting the board of ed $20 million. So now Anthony Cucci who was elected in 1985 went to Colgate who was redeveloping their property and asked them to prepay their taxes. Colgate said give us an tax abatement, the reason abatements are now common. Cucci loses in 1989 and McCann wins again. McCann starts to cut the board of ed budget and the state goes wild. They agreed to a figure of $72 million with the agreement that JC cannot cut the board of ed budget. This figure was frozen from 1989 until 2005. That is the reason Schundler administration said our contributions to the board of ed will not go up which proved to be wrong.

stateaidguy wrote:
...
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.

JCGuys wrote:
Quote:

Yvonne wrote:
Sorry, stateaidguy, the concept that we will never lose funding reminds me of the good old days during the Schundler administration. While giving out 20 year tax abatement, they also said out contribution to the board of ed will never increase. That is when we were paying $72 million to the schools. That concept is ridiculous. School districts across the state have low income children and are complaining about the formula, including Bayonne which pays close to 50% of school costs. I don't believe the concept never because laws change all the time.

**Sigh** Yvonne, did you even read stateaidguy's post beyond the first couple sentences?! Laws, especially unsustainable ones, can be changed...

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)

When a new reno or property comes on the market, they will appraise the current value and multiply by the equalization rate to arrive at the 1988 "assessed" value (excluding the standard 5-year abatements on renos/new properties). So if you bought a new property in 2015 for $1m, it would have an assessed value of around $300k (1m x 30.02%)

Yvonne wrote:
Sorry, stateaidguy, the concept that we will never lose funding reminds me of the good old days during the Schundler administration. While giving out 20 year tax abatement, they also said out contribution to the board of ed will never increase. That is when we were paying $72 million to the schools. That concept is ridiculous. School districts across the state have low income children and are complaining about the formula, including Bayonne which pays close to 50% of school costs. I don't believe the concept never because laws change all the time.

brewster wrote:
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?

Yvonne wrote:
The city has already contributed more money to the board of ed. We were paying $72 million, then in 2005, those caps were lifted, the costs increased. We are now paying $112 million. I am concerned about Fulop saying we need more affordable housing, in translation he is saying more children but no tax dollars from those new buildings.

Monroe wrote:
Not at all. I'm just saying that real estate values are only one factor that goes into deciding how school funding gets apportioned from Trenton. While obviously real estate has appreciated since the last reval, wide areas of JC still have very poor residents-and income is also a factor in calculating school funding. And Trenton can't arbitrarily reduce state aid, it's a formula that must be adhered to.