| Author | Message | ||
     Njjoseph |
Ffof -- I never said Scarsdale students were learning more. Nohero implied that with his statement about higher test scores. I'm not judging the school system here. I responded to a comment by Jfb that if the schools are thought to be mediocre by the parents that send them, why would they continue to do so, when there were options in other communities that would be less expensive. | ||
| Nohero |
More statistics (not that there aren't enough statistics on this board!) These are census data summaries for Maplewood and Scarsdale. Granted, these are 1990 figures. However, as we have all discussed, the "boom" occurred in the higher-end housing, for the most part. As we have seen in the reval (I remember now, Ffof, we were talking about the reval), there are other parts of town with lower housing values. Another significant difference is in the percentage of people classified as below the poverty level: 3.2% for Maplewood (and trending up) and 1.5% for Scarsdale (trending down). All in all, the school population being measured in Scarsdale is on average more affluent, with better educated parents. That impacts on the average standardized test scores. (And no, I do not think I said that higher test scores meant the kids were learning more in school. Scarsdale is ranked higher because of test scores) Leaving aside all of the statistics (which will probably not convince anyone, anyway), in considering school quality, I look at what my children are learning, at the opportunities they have in school, and at the activities and community involvement available. All in all, things seem pretty good here. | ||
| Townie |
Nilmeister, OK with you if we don't take this thread global? The short answer is, I figured I'd just do like Rudy Giuliani, Christie Whitman and Dubya and other Repubs have learned to do: Look the other way, and then do the periodic amnesty. And Jfb, I refuse to be taxed so other people can inherit the money. But honestly, you two! I'm not trying to duck either of you, but the reval is the topic here. And the school, I guess. Sorry if I've prolonged this. See you in the soapbox someday, where I'm sure you can persuade me to close our borders and abolish Social Security if you only try a little harder. I've only held my positions for about 30 years. ;-] | ||
| Townie |
Octofoil, I specifically mentioned all the things you elaborated in my post. But other people have been talking about creating a new group of "hidden poor" in Maplewood, and they were talking money, not loss of intangibles. | ||
| Townie |
Jfb, Your argument about the schools doesn't quite make sense, but maybe I'm misunderstanding. It sounds like you're saying either: When taxes were $10K, I didn't mind sending my kids to mediocre schools. But now they they are $14K, I do. Or are you saying: I send my kids to private school because the schools are mediocre. Now that my taxes are going up from $10K to $14K, I can't afford that. Which are you saying? If it's the latter, are you trying to cut the public school budget for everybody so you can continue to pay private tuition? | ||
| Townie |
Bacata, Maybe someday we should start another thread about this myth that residents -- any residents anywhere -- in Maplewood should have appealed their taxes prior to the reval. The way I see it is this: Anybody who went to the assessor with their 1981 assessment anytime within the last 10 years and demanded to have their house re-assessed would have been told by the assessor "You're nuts!" Anybody who got their house assessed to market value (the only legal assessment the assessor can give, right?) would have had their property value officially boosted up to higher than almost anyone else's in town --- and they would have paid much more in taxes (based on the uniform mil rate, than anybody else in town. Houses in the Jefferson area were typically assessed at around $75-$150K in 1981. So if you bought a house on Tuscan Road, for instance, in 1995, for $175,000, and asked to have it reassessed, a market value assessment would have put you ABOVE assessments in Jefferson. It was the TOWN's responsibility to do a reval. Individual homeowners, even if they had asked, would have been told to go home and wait for the reval lest they kill themselves overpaying their share of the taxes. At best, residents of Hilton/Orchard etc. could have banded together to sue the town to force the reval. Does anyone see it differently? kathleen | ||
| Beach |
Townie, you brought up immigration on this thread so why don't you answer Nilmeister's question with a little more clarity? Your answer was a non-answer, just the usual I know better than them put-down of Republicans. What, pray tell, was Clinton's policy on immigration? Oh, I forgot, he and his co-president were too busy packing up the Beverly Hillbillies truck to bother with that issue. As for MY humble opinion on increasing immigration, forget going global, I'd like to see a lot more east-siders like myself and Nakaille(if she's so inclined!)immigrate to Durand Rd. | ||
| Willfalaise1 |
Here's my understanding of how the appeal process worked pre-reval. And yes, people were successfully appealing their assessments before the reval. Part of the reason we had to do it was because the town was losing so many of these appeals. Not sure where the number came from, but before the reval there was an average percentage representing the assessed value of houses in town compared to their current market value. From Jerry's posts way back when I think it was about 36%. Meaning that on average they thought that homes in town were assessed at approximately 36% of their current market value. So if you thought that your 1981 assessment was more than 36% of its current value you could appeal and would win if you were outside some standard deviation (a few percentage points?). Again, I'm guessing at the exact percentage, but if we use 36% as the example, here's how it worked. Say that, based on a sale on your block or a refinancing assessment you thought your home was worth $200,000 on the current market. If your 1981 assessment was more than 36% of that number or 72,000 you could appeal and would most likely win. So yes, this was an option, although a somewhat complicated one, pre-reval. Maybe Jerry could confirm what the percentages and procedures actually were. | ||
| Yvette |
when my husband and I first looked in this town, we noticed the different tax prices on the different house, but we assumed that the higher taxes was because that specific house may have had more to tax or had something different than the other houses we looked at. when we decided on our (the one we live in now) I thought the taxes were a bit high, we made friends and talked with our neighbors...we all were paying about the same, in fact I was paying less than most of them. So no, when people say we should have appealed, I disagree...what grounds would we have appealed on?? besides I didn't fully understand this whole tax concept until this reval, I never really paid attention to my property card or understood it, I didn't even know that a reval wasn't done in 20 years. | ||
| Njjoseph |
Yvette -- regarding your last statement -- I'm sure now that those of us on this board as well as those that asked for a review will pay attention to the property card and taxes. If it weren't for the reval, I'm sure I would have gone my merry way paying the high taxes without any understanding of the assessment. At least now, even though there is quite a bit of controversy, we've all learned a great deal! | ||
| Townie |
Beach, Come on over to Durand Road if you can find a house for sale -- or want to pay the taxes! I hope you like deer! ;-} I didn't mean to sound like I was brushing off Nilmeister, just trying not clog up this thread. I was tweaking him about my agreeing with Republicans (you may not understand the history of this tweaking) and their having (unspoken) the same position I do: Let more immigrants come, even illegally, and do periodic amnesties. I'd prefer an upfront pro-immigration policy closer to Canada's (based on valuable job skills, not family connections) but advocating wider open doors is a hard sell politically. (Although Republicans -- not in Maplewood, mind you -- often go to bat for low-wage immigration). In recent years, what we've gotten is a de facto pro-immigration policy with nobody enforcing immigration laws. Which is fine with me. They pay taxes! And that's what I want: More taxpayers. People get so mad at me Beach for writing long posts I hesitate to go on with the complicated subject here. If I hear of any houses for sale on Durand I'll let you know. It's awfully immigrant friendly around here. My neighbors are from Israel, Burkina Faso, Scotland and I think China. (Somebody has been flying the Chinese flag recently instead of one of those suburban watermelons!) We've even got several families who moved from other distant parts of Maplewood! | ||
| Townie |
Willfalaise1, Thanks enormously! I've been so puzzled by this discussion. Very interesting. I'm with Yvette, however, in my experience of moving in long after 1981 and not understanding much about my assessment and how it figured into my life until this reval. No matter where I lived, I think it would have taken me a while to figure out I might have a reason to appeal, if I did. What was the cost to the town of continually losing appeals? | ||
| Dytunck |
Townie, I don't know how to attach another message, so I took the liberty of cutting and pasting Jerry Ryan's message from December, 1999. It answers a couple questions recently asked here. Probably begs a couple too... Dy It won't fit on one message, so I'll send in two parts. Part I "Let me start this message by saying that I configured my agenda posting to send me email whenever anyone posts a follow-up; this turns out to be the best way for me to manage the flow of postings here. As a result, I am responding to questions people asked in follow-ups to my agenda posting... because that's the only messages that I see. This means I have not seen or read the old threads on reval; to the extent that this mail does not answer questions, pls. post follow-ups to this and I'll try and answer what I can. Sorry for the length of this but there were a lot of questions and there's a bunch of info to give out here. First, regarding reevaluation, let me give some information and answer some questions. Your individual property tax is set by what your assessment is. The last town-wide assessment was done in 1981. Since that time, the value of houses in town has changed, and it has not changed in a uniform way. If everyone's values changed at the same rate, then there would be no need to worry about reevaluation. How this affects you personally is as follows. Think about the ratio of your total assessment to the value of your house as an indicator of how "good" (i.e. accurate) your assessment is. There is a townwide average ratio that is a good baseline. In 1998 the average ratio in town was 40.21. In 1999 it was 39.05. In 2000 it looks like it will be about 36.5. [these ratios are from the assessor by the way]. After the reval, the ratio will be 1.00. As a general rule of thumb, the closer your own personal "ratio" is to the town average, the closer to "correct" your assessment is, and the more likely it is that your share of the taxes will remain constant after the reval. Another way to say this is that if your own personal ratio is higher than the average, your taxes are higher than they ought to be. If it is lower, then they are lower than they ought to be. Your ratio is allowed to be plus or minus 15% of the average. | ||
| Dytunck |
Part II "The problem with this non-uniform distribution is that there ends up being tax appeals brought by the people whose assessment is too high. There is a small cost associated with defending the town against those appeals (about $27K in 1999). There is also a hidden cost (nobody whose taxes are too low is going to appeal to have those taxes raised) and a fairness issue. The Township Committee has discussed a reval for the last few years. You would have seen this discussion at our meetings, including the strategic planning meeting that we held at the beginning of 1999. We will eventually be compelled by the County Tax Board to do a reval: we could have decided to wait for that time, or to "bite the bullet" now. We decided to do it out of a sense of fairness (making sure that people's properties are correctly assessed and that nobody is paying an unfair share of taxes), and in an attempt to eliminate some of the legal time and expense associated with tax appeals. The process involves retaining an appraiser to do the evaluation, telling everyone their new assessments by about October of 2000, allowing people time to meet with the appraisers to question and/or contest anything. The new assessments are then effective for calendar 2001. As to why an emergency appropriation was used: As I said above, we'd discussed this a number of times over the years, and had decided we would do a reval in the near future. When the 1999 budget was assembled, we were not sure if we wanted to start the reevaluation in 1999 or not. We elected to not do so and did not include any money for it in the 1999 budget... which meant that the next opportunity to fund this would be the finalized 2000 budget, around midyear 2000. When we took a closer look at the reval process and timelines, we realized that the process would take longer, and would have to begin late in 1999 in order to be done in time for year 2001. If we waited until next year to fund this and start the work, we would not be done with the reval until 2002. We also learned that the state would allow us to spead the cost of the reval over five years. We decided to do that. An "emergency appropriation" simply means that we need to spend monies that we originally had not included in this budget (kind of a 'weak' meaning of the word "emergency", but there it is). This happened because we did not decide to do this in 1999 until after the 1999 budget was finalized, and we did not want to wait until mid-2000. The "conspiracy theory" mentioned in one of "Hillbilly"'s postings was funny, but just not true. Since there is an election every year, we could never get an issue "out of an election" even if we wanted to. On this particular issue, Vic DeLuca and I are up for reelection next year. This effort will be ongoing all year and will be happening right in the middle of the 2000 election season. Anyone angry about this will certainly have an opportunity to let us know about it, both during the campaign and at the polls. Not much of a conspiracy, eh? To "Marie"'s question (our taxes would go up and we would receive what added services?), there are a couple of answers. The reval process itself does not change the overall taxes in the town, just the distribution of the assessments and taxes. So a reval does not necessarily mean that your individual taxes will go up. They may go up, go down, or remain the same. The taxes are more fairly assessed in town and everyone is paying their appropriate share. To the couple of comments that "we won't see this answered in an open forum at any Township Committee Meeting": respectfully, that's just not so. Issues and upcoming items are discussed all the time. Last year's strategic planning meeting, which was an open public meeting and which was covered in the local and regional newspapers, has been a blueprint for a lot of the work that has been done this year, including ongoing discussions of reval. There will likely be another one next January for the year 2000. Hopefully this posting has answered some of these questions, too. Lastly, regarding Sherry Jenkins. Someone had posted Sherry's number with a suggestion that everyone call her for the answer. As a way to use her time most efficiently, let me suggest this instead: if this (or future) postings does not answer you, let me know and I'll try and get her to answer such questions once, in writing. Thanks Jerry Ryan " | ||
| Ffof |
Wow - Dytunck - you dug deep! I like the part about the plusminus 15% | ||
| Jfb |
Townie, Most immigrants pay taxes? I know dozens of illegals, none pay taxes!!! I've had contractors come to my house and use laborers from South America, all illegal! They pay no taxes. Cash is king... They send their kids to our schools, use our hospitals (emergency care, free for poor) etc. etc. They will rent an apartment and jam three couples in two bedroom, sometimes more. | ||
| Willfalaise1 |
So Townie, just to continue this now that we have some real numbers. Let's take someone who, before the reval, had an appraisal from their bank indicating their house was worth 200,000. According to Jerry's earlier post, the average ratio was about 36%, so this person had grounds to appeal if her 1981 assessment was 72,000 or higher. It turns out though, after the reval, that the 1981 assessment was not 36% of current market value but more like 26%. So she should have been able to appeal any 1981 assessment over 52,000 but had no legal grounds to do so. So someone like Yvette may have had grounds to appeal before the reval, but would not have come close to getting the relief that the reval is giving her. | ||
| Overtaxdalready |
Didn't California have a big tax protest issue a couple of years ago that involved complaints about the large numbers of immigrants getting government handouts? Odds are very few of them were on the tax rolls. | ||
| Eb1154 |
Bacata, I didn't know how much I was overpaying until I saw the reval numbers. when I heard about the reval I thought my taxes were going to increase until I started hearing what other people in town were paying in taxes. That is when I first realized the inequities in town. As far as my neighbors finding out about their taxes...I went out and rang doorbells and advised them as to what was going on in town and to make sure they understood what the reval meant to them. So many of them thought their taxes were going up based on their revals. | ||
| Townie |
Jfb (and Overtaxedalready?), I think this is a discussion you should be having with Pete Wilson, who politically died fighting this cause. How much immigrants pay in taxes (sales and other)vs-. how much they consumed in government services was looked at extremely carefully in California, and California came out ahead. I'm sure the California studies are still available and can be read, although since deregulation turned off the lights out there, I admit it's harder. Jfb, I promise not to turn you in for hiring illegals. Not my style. Although I won't blame anybody for turning us all in for clogging up this reval thread with this extraneous, unproductive debate that won't change minds. |
