| Author |
Message |
    
Waynecaviness
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 6:45 pm: |     |
Townie,
I do agree with and share your sense of how difficult it would be to know the number and significance of factual errors made by Certified. Thats exactly why I keep asking about any provisions the TC might have made for assurance of the quality of Certifieds work. Just because it is now difficult, because it is ex post, doesn't mean it shouldnt be done.
Anecdotally, it sounds like a significant number. But who knows? We paid them a lot of money. Did we get what we paid for? Who knows? |
Jln
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 6:52 pm: | |
Townie,
Actually, I said nothing about your being sinister . . . only that you don't have the guts to stand up and be counted. If you did go public, then we could all see how large or small an individual you truly are.
As for the TC, each and every one of them spends a tremendous amount of time and effort on behalf of the citizens of Maplewood, and each of them obviously has no aversion to being placed into the crucible of public opinion. For those reasons, even though I may seriously disagree with some or all of them in this matter, they are each owed a large measure of respect.
JLNathenson |
Townie
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 6:58 pm: | |
Yes waynecaviness,
I think you are asking all these questions in good faith. Accountability, etc. But let me also toss this in the mix: I've also wanted people to come at their assessment the other way, which is to ask themselves first: Is this the market value of my house? And if the answer is yes, ask if redoing the reval with a different methadology is worth it, or if going after Certified for all or part of the contract money is worth it.
My gut feeling is that every property card will look weird, have anamolies, have credits and charges that seem implausible, and that if Certified showed us its software and formulations, there will be lots of weird looking stuff there. I hope everyone is satisfied with a market assessment of their home and a clean bill of health from the independent assessor.
Of course, people who have received an assessment that isn't market value should get it corrected. And whether or not the TC should get money back from CV, I just don't know. If by Feb. 15, everybody in town has a fair market assessment, I don't know how much more money I want the town to spend on this. |
Townie
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 7:01 pm: | |
JLN,
I'm huge.
Thanks for the change of tone about the TC. Keep working on a more becoming, neighborly public posture. You're not quite there yet. |
Townie
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 7:08 pm: | |
Thanks for pointing out I've got nerve. JLN just called me a coward. And that I have no integrity or "guts." When somebody talks like that who doesn't even know me, I think they are revealing more about themselves than about me.
I keep an anonymous posture on these boards because I don't want people coming after me personally. I don't want anybody going after anybody personally, which has been my big complaint about Fairtax's rhetoric. Did you read that letter they've been circulating? |
Waynecaviness
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 7:19 pm: | |
Townie,
I can't help but feel that you're taking too much on faith. The details are important, IMHO, very important. Permit me another real example: some friends bought a house here about 15 years ago. The lot has a storm drain right across the middle of the back yard, which lowered the value of the house. Taking the storm drain and other considerations into account, the house was valued at about 65% of the value of the house next door. Through the years, various realtors have consistently valued the house in a similar fashion. Now comes Certified. Guess what? The storm drain suddenly doesn't count any more, and the house is now valued at approximately 100% of the value of the house next door! No renovations in the meantime and the house is in somewhat worse condition, relatively speaking, than when our friends moved into it (it had been freshly painted, etc., at that time.) So, what happened to suddenly make this house jump, relative to the house next door? Nothing. Certainly not the Mid-Town Direct. Nothing but the methodology used by Certified, that is.
So, you see, the methodology is important, the details are important. The township is going to have to do another reval someday. We need to document this process, its foibles and weaknesses and its strengths to be able to do a better job next time.
Townie, I guess I just cant take as much of this on faith as you can! |
Lseltzer
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 7:41 pm: | |
Townie:
>>But who was running for a TC seat this year? I don't remember voting for anybody for TC in November
Jerry Ryan and Vic Deluca were reelected last November (by overwhelming majorities). |
Lseltzer
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 7:45 pm: | |
One more time Fairtax01:
You say in this thread that you signed the letter to the News Record, which is not in this week's edition. Why are you unwilling to put names on the supposedly identical letter you posted here?
I know this sounds like a cliche, but I must assume you have something to hide.
Larry Seltzer |
Townie
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 10:45 pm: | |
Waynecaviness,
We're only just missing each other. I'm not taking things on faith. But I've never seen a reval or assessments done before, and this is what I'm asking:
I'm assuming that when all is said and done, somebody with a storm drain may not get discounted for the storm drain because of oversight. Somebody else gets counted as having two kitchens. Somebody else's tool shed gets counted as an extra bedroom. Somebody else's finished basement isn't counted when it should be. I'm thinking (perhaps wrongly) that's normal when 8,000 homes (is that our pop?) are being processed. I'm also thinking an assessor crunches the numbers wholesale for similar houses in similar neighborhoods, so some house with a special defect is likely to be assumed to be generic until the owner complains.
I'm thinking that the face-to-face appeals process rectifies all complaints. Of course, if out of 8,000 homes some significant number yields evidence that nobody really looked at the houses, causing the assessments to be much higher or lower than market value, that shouldn't be ignored to be sure.
Looking at the assessment numbers Jerry Ryan put up, what I see are the house prices I would tell a friend to expect to pay if he or she wanted to move to Maplewood this year, in a whole variety of neighborhoods. I'm guessing that, house by house, some people have storm drains in the back yard or no bathroom on the first floor and other value lowering things I can't see, and they'll get their assessments lowered to reflect that.
But I don't see across the board wild numbers.
So I'm asking: Provided we can take care of the needed adjustments through the administrative process, do we want to pay to do another reval just to enjoy a tidier process that yields the same assessments?
I'm sort of agnostic about what to do for people whose assessments are correct but it drives them nuts that Certified couldn't prove their methodology, or said they had a deck when they don't. |
Townie
| | Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2001 - 10:47 pm: | |
Lseltzer,
Thanks for reminding me.
I guess I must've voted for Pat Buchanan twice.
Who stands for election next and when, do you know? |
Jln
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 7:34 am: | |
Townie,
Yes, stating your positions openly and publicly without the veil of anonymity does carry with it an element of risk . . . your unwillingess to bear that risk is exactly my point. It also carries with it an element of responsibility . . . your unwillingess to accept that responsibility is exactly my point.
JLNathenson |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 8:44 am: | |
JLN,
I didn't miss your point. Fairtax has not been a responsible voice in this debate, and that has nothing to do whether the people who author its communciations sign their names to letters, flyers, e-mail or message board postings. The letter that appeared on these boards, was circulated by e-mail and was delivered to the News-Record was hardly a constructive contribution to working to solve problems in this town, in tone or substance.
I continue to be surprised that you and others in Fairtax think you can call people who disagree with you names and paint false portratis of them and believe the people in this town will embrace you or trust you or think you are doing us good. You aren't doing good with that kind of rhetoric, and don't expect me to admire it even when you sign your name to it. That you aren't ashamed to do so doesn't impress me. Name callers never strike me as brave. They strike me as people who have no legitimate arguments in response to being contradicted.
This reval has caused a lot of emotion and disturbance in this town which Fairtax, in its latest letters, appears to want to keep stirring up with innuendo and posturing. Despite the continuing loud declarations of being only interested in fairness, blah blah, Fairtax isn't coming across as being sincerely interested in finding out what is legally possible and helping people understand the difficult position we are in with respect to NJ state property tax law.
I am glad that town residents have felt free to come to these boards and post their thoughts, whether they call themselves Euclidean, Nilmeister Dave 32 or what have you. Your bullying people into revealing themeselves is an attempt to silence the debate. Nobody should be made to feel Fairtax and JL Nathenson decide all the rules or else we risk venom from you. It's really shocking you would try to do that while at the same time trying to convince people that you are all just earnest citizens wanting to work with everybody.
I think the reaction that Fairtax received from posters on these boards will change your public posture and I'm glad of it. No amount of insults or bullying from you against me personally is going to prevent me from offering my views on these boards and criticizing your tactics when I feel its appropriate. |
Waynecaviness
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 9:04 am: | |
Townie,
You keep looking at the big picture, i.e., "I dont see across the board wild numbers." Looking at the big picture, I don't either. But, as the saying goes, the devil is in the details. The owner shouldn't have to complain about a detail when his home is purported to have been inspected by someone purported to be exercising and adhering to professional standards. Yes, of course, in a population 8,000, there are going to be mistakes. But how many are reasonable? I fear that my relatively small personal-knowledge sample of factual errors, when combined with anecdotal evidence of more of the same, suggests that the "big picture" obscures many devilish details that represent a lack of care and adherence to the aforementioned professional standards. More to the point, we don't know whether that is the true state of nature or not. There was apparently no QA mechanisim or process in place. No evident accountability.
The mistakes that we don't learn from this episode, those that are then responsible some time hence may repeat. Or somehat more prosaically, those that dont learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
One more question to all contributors: When I began posting to this board a few weeks ago, I didn't include my e-mail address as part of the profile because I saw that few others did. I have no objection to making my e-mail publicly available. As you might have surmised, you can certainly see my name from
the "handle". On the few other boards to which I contribute, the provision of an e-mail facilitates private conversations when appropriate and is a convenience. (Although such does have the considerable drawback of leaving your e-mail open to harvesting by the bots that crawl the web constructing e-mail lists for e-marketing, otherwise known as spam!) Thoughts anyone, or is this a topic for a new thread? |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 9:31 am: | |
Waynecaviness (I thought it was just a really cool and complicated handle):
Interesting stuff first: I didn't really think about being more public and accessible on the boards until people began making it some sort of pre-requisite for speaking one's thoughts, but I'm surprised people use their real names or offer their e-mail on such an open board just because of Internet security reasons. I only participate in one other message board on the 'net, and it offers a "private message" function that allows people to send messages, not to home e-mail, but a message bin only the user can access. Maybe that's possible here? I worry that since my real home e-mail is elsewhere on the 'net associated with credit card numbers, etc., some determined hacker could get the key to an awful lot of stuff. You know, those people who are home all day with nothing to do but play around on message boards. ;-)
OK: On to boring everybody publicly about the "devilish details"
We've got no disagreement about learning from the lessons. I'm not sure we've got any disagreement. I most certainly want to know when all is said and done whether re-inspection of properties turned up 20 miscounted bathrooms or 200 or 2000. And to answer the question "how many miscounts are reasonable" I guess I'd need to see the work of another's town's assessment or reval process.
In principle I agree with you that the owner shouldn't have to complain and I don't want to strand owners to some stonewalling appeals process, but I can't think of a way to protect everybody from the possibility of that, and unless Certified is run by total fools, surely they have some language in their contract that allows them to make a "normal" amount of errors. It would be nice if they had to pay back for every successful appeal. Maybe the town has recourse that way, just like my certified accountant has to pay up if the IRS comes after me because mistakes he made doing my taxes. |
Franny
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 9:59 am: | |
Townie - I'm on the Fairtax e-mail list and I haven't received this pattern of bullying messages you keep mentioning. They've mostly provided resources and times and dates of Township Committee meetings. They sent a few notices about not hogging the spotlight at Township Co. meetings and listening to other speakers - pretty tame stuff. The letters seem to me to be mostly common sense advice. The letter posted at the beginning of this thread was the most aggressive I've received from them yet. I may not agree with the whole letter (I don't) but I think they've been responsible for pushing the Township Committee to look into the reval. With the (new) reduction I received last week my house comes in about 10K over what I think it's worth and I'm OK with that. It took Fairtax to make the Township C. really pay attention and start questioning the process themselves. There was something wrong with the reval or they wouldn't have changed the assessments for perhaps 20% of Maplewood. Any grassroots group is going to be rough around the edges at times - I think they've accomplished a lot of positive work and so has the Township Committee. |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 10:40 am: | |
Franny,
In another post a week or so ago in another thread I said in essence what you said. I believe I said something to the effect that Fairtax deserved credit for raising a shout and providing information about meetings. I don't know if you went back and looked at a previous message I posted where I quoted e-mails I got once after having contacted Fairtax to be put on their mailing list, but in contrast to their initial assertions that all they wanted was to work with the TC and the town, what I began receiving was stuff about class action lawsuits, getting the face of the TC, going after the school budget. Fairtax now says a lot of that didn't come from them, even though it came from people whose other e-mails they distributed. I assume they are now being more careful, although I also feel this latest aggressive letter indicates Fairtax isn't exactly as unbiased and open to everybody's ideas as they like to make it seem in the prefaces to their dubious demands.
I agree with you that grassroots organizations aren't polished. But there is difference between being rough-edged and downright insulting to neighbors. This is a small town, a nice and civil community and I can't see where their being so insulting to the TC is productive or warranted. I think they deserve a sharp rebuke. If they are looking to be the town bullies, they need to be shown some teeth in return. And I was mucho annoyed by their accusation that the TC was trying to cloak everything in secrecy, when in fact members of the TC have been making all kinds of data available.
Once the second letter adjusting people's assessments went out, Fairtax dug into a position of stopping or delaying the revaluation despite knowing that people now were largely OK with their assessments, as you put it. I'm disturbed by that. The fact that an error was corrected is evidence of the error, sure, but once it is corrected, if Fairtax won't accept "yes" for an answer, I can't help but wonder what their agenda is. A week or two ago they were putting out flyers saying "Reject and Redo!" They keep hinting at a class action suit. Now they say they want a postponement. Why? Thus far I've not heard anything that sounds good for the whole town.
I've listened to both Fairtax and the TC, and I think the TC has consistently proven a better, more level headed source of information about the reval than Fairtax. I think it is up to them at this point to prove they still have something constructive to contribute to Maplewood.
And on a purely personal note, I'm unused to encountering in Maplewood people who accuse me of having no integrity, no guts, all that. Never happened before and I discuss differences of opinion all the time in this town. If the point of Fairtax is to see the world in terms of enemies, they will surely create all the ones they need to validate their point of view. But I think they've learned a lesson from this thread. |
Jln
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 11:30 am: | |
Townie,
Nobody has said anything about posting your email address . . . just your name will suffice. As for bullying, I'd say your tone is a good deal more strident than mine.
JLNathenson |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 11:41 am: | |
JL Nathenson,
Do you listen? The answer is no. Nada. No name. Never. Get it? (Real names can be traced to e-mail addresses.)
And have I said you have no integrity or guts? You have been insulting, not strident -- and not only to me. And increasingly the point of communciations from you and Fairtax has been to twist words. Pounce and twist. Don't you care how others perceive you anymore?
I am not the only person in this thread or on these boards criticizing Fairtax, and not the only one doing so under a message board name. I'm hardly suggesting you now go be insulting to them as well, but I can't help but think that the reason you are fixed on me is that I am lodging good arguments against Fairtax. However, I don't think I've actually got the best ones. Take a look at the Who is Fairtax thread. |
Mtierney
| | Posted on Friday, February 2, 2001 - 11:44 am: | |
I think it's to Fairtax's credit if they continue the battle after receiving adjustments. Perhaps they truly believe the process was flawed for ALL of the people! How can you defend the TC? They would never have produced info if not for the enormous pressure from irate taxpayers - organized and otherwise. I would like to know what the TC was doing during the months of reassessment. Did our parttime assessor report once in awhile? Did he submit reports to the TC? If not, why not? Was he in regular contact with Certified while the work was underway? If not, why not? I cannot accept that Certified worked and produced their assessments virtually in secret. Do read the Millburn rejects thread. |
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