Monmouth tax appeals drop 23 percent

FREEHOLD - Property tax appeal filings dropped by 23 percent in Monmouth County this year, a sign supporters say shows the county's controversial property assessment pilot program is working.

Monmouth County Tax Board commissioners today will start hearing the 3,766 tax appeals that residents filed to challenge their 2017 property tax value.

That's down 1,247 from the number filed last year and down 2,288 from 2015 when filings jumped as residents felt the brunt of the Monmouth County Assessment Demonstration Program.

"The program is working and people are understanding the program," Tax Board President Cliff Moore said. "It’s about people paying their fair share of taxes. The people that were underpaying are getting caught up and the people that were overpaying are paying less."

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The goal of the pilot program is to update property tax values each year so they better match what homes and businesses would sell for on the real estate market. But the effort also faced a backlash from many property owners who were shocked by tax value spike.

An Asbury Park Press investigation in 2015 also revealed questionable business relationships among the public officials who created the program and those who got the work. The Press' coverage sparked a Monmouth County Prosecutor's investigation that is still ongoing.

But defenders of the program have long maintained that those issues were overblown. They say the drop in appeals proves their point.

Moore said tax appeals are declining because individual property assessments are more accurate as a result of the pilot program and the real estate market is generally stable in Monmouth County.

He also said property owners are more knowledgeable about property values and about their ability to win appeals under the pilot program. Moore said 47.3 percent of residential property owners saw their tax bills decrease last year, according to the tax board's analysis of tax bills.

That analysis also showed 52.4 percent of tax bills went up. Less than a percent — 726 properties of more than 211,000 countywide — stayed the same. The median tax bill increase for all residential properties was $12.37.

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Not all towns saw appeals drop. Ocean Township saw its appeals more than quadruple, from 62 appeals last year to 277 this year; however, it also underwent a revaluation, a process to update all property values at the same time. That process is frequently followed by a spike in appeals.

Middletown, which did not undergo a full revaluation, saw its appeals increase from 306 last year to 400 this year.

Holly Morgan thinks the Facebook group, Middletown Residents For Fair Value Taxation, may have played a part in the increase. She formed the group so residents could help each other with appeals after seeing a lot of complaints in various community groups about increases in tax values.

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The tax value on her North Middletown home increased $25,000, while Morgan has heard of others in this working class neighborhood whose values increased by as much as $50,000. North Middletown residents say home sales in the past year don't support those types of increases.

"That doesn’t do well for a neighborhood that is already struggling and that neighborhood is struggling," she said.

Countywide, the 2017 appeals are also well below the high Monmouth County saw from 2009 to 2012, when the housing market collapsed prompting the Great Recession.

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The largest drop in the number of appeals this year came from Manalapan, where only 93 appeals were filed this year compared to 508 appeals filed last year.

Wall's appeal filings are less than half of the number filed last year after the township's controversial revaluation. The filings dropped to 340 appeals, down from the 745 appeals filed in 2016.

Susanne Cervenka: 732-643-4229; scervenka@gannettnj.com.