BERKELEY – Berkeley Township will be undergoing a tax revaluation in the future, which will change every property’s assessment.
The assessment is different from what you paid for your property. Tax assessors will look at your property and determine what it is worth based on a number of factors, such as number of bedrooms. The property and the building on it will both be assessed.
As the market moves up and down, the taxes that you are paying might not be accurate any more. Once the property assessments of an entire town is off by 15%, on average, from where they should be, the state orders your town to perform a revaluation.
If you don’t agree with your new value, there is an appeal process.
Revaluations don’t bring any more revenue into a town, they just shift where the money is coming from. Using extremely simple numbers, town might be raising $1 million in taxes. Before a revaluation, that $1 million is coming from every property owner – residential and commercial. After a revaluation, the taxes being raised will still be $1 million. The difference might be, for example, someone living in a beach house might see their taxes go from $100 to $140, while two people living inland might see it go from $100 to $80.
Berkeley hasn’t had a revaluation in at least a decade.
Township Business Administrator John Camera noted that the work the township is doing right now is very preliminary, such as preparing new tax maps. There is no information available about the costs of the revaluation or the exact timeline.
A county chart has a plan for Berkeley and Jackson Township to have revals in 2024. Point Pleasant Borough is scheduled for 2023. Lakehurst and Pine Beach are scheduled for a reassessment next year. A revaluation is done by an outside company and a reassessment is done in-house. Reassessments are usually for smaller towns.
In other news, the township approved a shared service agreement with Seaside Park. They have a recycling yard that’s closer than Bayville for residents of the South Seaside Park section of Berkeley. The agreement allows Berkeley residents to use a container in the Seaside Park recycling yard, Camera said.
The township also awarded a contract to Shore Top Construction Corporation in the amount of $300,425 for pickle ball courts at Whispering Pines Park.
