LAKEHURST – Borough residents are fearing a potential tax increase will be brought about by a county-mandated reassessment of their properties.
A reassessment is when every property in a town is looked at to make sure the owner is paying the right amount of taxes. The tax bill is based on the value of the property, not necessarily what it was purchased for. If the average value of homes in a town is more than 15% away from where they should be, a town is ordered to do a reassessment or a revaluation. The difference between these two terms is that a reassessment is done in-house, usually by smaller towns, and a revaluation is done by an outside contractor.
Resident Bruce Morrison asked about the situation during a recent Borough Council meeting and Mayor Harry Robbins explained the situation.
“Unfortunately, we are ordered to do that. We have no choice in the matter. The county ordered it. We have to do it. The end result was not what we were looking to do,” the mayor said.
Mayor Robbins said, “in some instances people’s taxes can actually go down. It has happened.” He added that often residents see no change to their tax bill.
Councilwoman Patricia Hodges said she spoke with the borough tax assessor recently and he recommended having a public meeting before the reassessment took place so people can have their questions answered.
“Yes, we can definitely hold a meeting,” the mayor said, noting that the tax assessor would be present for such a session.
Council President Steven Oglesby noted that the borough’s last reassessment was 10 years ago. “It doesn’t mean taxes will go up. They usually stay pretty much the same. You don’t want to wait 20 years before doing it. Don’t be afraid of what an assessment will do.”
Hodges also posed another suggestion for the governing body to consider in the future: the hiring of a business manager.
She said while the borough has been able to function well without a business administrator, in her observations, “I really think we should start to consider, not this year obviously, maybe not a borough business administrator but since we can make the position what we want to make it, maybe something along the lines of a manager or coordinator.”
“Not someone who will supervise but a point person or coordinator for everything that is happening in the borough. Maybe we should start looking at that down the road and formulate what we want that position to be,” Hodges added.
Mayor Robbins noted that with any civil service position, “you have to go by what is required.”
The councilwoman said that there was an opportunity to create the position within those guidelines. “We don’t necessarily have to think of it in terms that we always thought. Let’s step out of the box and look at the position in a different way.”
“We need to look at how we want that position to be,” Hodges said.
Mayor Robbins said one consideration would be whether such a position would be full or part-time.
In other business Councilman Jim Davis reported that a planned repair to the Lake Horicon pavilion would be done before July 4 as an inhouse repair project of the borough’s Department of Public Works.
