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How High Will Our Property
Taxes Go? (2007-11-01)
If you've seen our town-wide
political mailing, you may have questions about how we
obtained the facts we presented with regard to Aberdeen's
tax rates. We assure you, "It's All True." Read below.
An Analysis of Aberdeen Township’s
Property Tax Rates
During more than one election campaign in Aberdeen Township, we have
heard the incumbent Aberdeen Democratic Party brag about keeping the
municipal tax rate steady. They recognize that property taxes are
going up, but they tell us that this is due to the school tax portion
of the property tax bill, and that they have no control over that
portion.
We heard the above argument so many times that we decided to research
if it was true or not. In particular, we wanted to verify if the incumbent
Council has been keeping the municipal tax rate steady as they claim
(our analysis focused on the 12 year period from 1995-2007 where the
Democratic Party was in uninterrupted control of the Council). Along
the way, we learned some interesting facts:
- Aberdeen Township has the 4th highest Local Tax out of
53 municipalities in Monmouth County (the Local Tax is
the combination of School and Municipal taxes).
- Aberdeen Township has the 2nd highest School Tax out of the 53
municipalities.
- The Municipal Tax rate in Aberdeen has risen over 36% from 1995-2007
- The School Tax rate in Aberdeen has risen over 67% from 1995-2007
For those of you who don’t know, the property tax bill you
receive annually in Aberdeen and pay quarterly is composed of a number
of different taxes. These include the County Tax, Open Space Tax,
Regional School Tax, Municipal Tax, Fire District and Garbage taxes.
Our analysis focused on mainly the Municipal Tax, since this is the
one the incumbent Council has claimed to hold steady, although adding
in the Fire District and Garbage taxes does not change the conclusions
of our analysis. The County Tax and Open Space Tax are both charged
by Monmouth County and so are not included in this analysis.
Tax rate data is public record, and freely available on Monmouth
County’s web site by navigating to Departments,
Tax Board, Municipal Data.
On this web page, one can look up the tax rates for any municipality
in Monmouth County and for any year from 1992 and later.
If you go to the web page above, you will notice a number of drop
down boxes. For the purpose of this analysis, the box entitled “General
Tax Rate” is most important. You can select a year from this
drop down box and see the School, Municipal, and County tax rates.
Try it - go get one of your old tax bills and make sure you can verify
that the data matches your bill for the year in question. You should
also note that the actual dollar amount of your tax bill is calculated
by multiplying the “total assessed valuation information” (land
plus improvements), printed on your tax bill, by the tax rate in question,
then dividing by 100 (since the rate is per $100 assessment). For
instance, a property assessed at $240,000 would pay $1989.60 in Municipal
taxes at a tax rate of 0.829.
Most important to realize is “the tax rate is the tax rate”.
Numbers don’t lie, people do. If your assessed value has not
changed (the last town-wide reassessment was in 1992 and the next
is scheduled for 2009), when a particular tax rate goes up, you pay
correspondingly more of that particular tax.
In order to look for trends in Aberdeen Township’s
tax rates, it is necessary to look at each year and record
the tax rate data. We have done this and included it in a
spreadsheet, and the result can be viewed here.
The next thing we did is add a column to our spreadsheet
which takes 1995 as the beginning tax rate and then calculates
the percentage that a tax rate has increased over the 1995
values. For any year, you can then look at how much the tax
rate has increased since 1995. You can see clearly that the
Municipal tax rate in 2007 is slightly over 36% higher than
in 1995, and the School tax rate is over 67% higher. Here
is a chart of the results so you
can get a clear picture of the tax rate increases.
With the above in mind, it is clear that the Municipal tax rate has
not been held steady by the incumbent Democratic council during their
tenure.
Our next analysis focused on comparing Aberdeen Townships’ tax
rate to the other municipalities in Monmouth County. This
is done using the data obtained from the same Monmouth County
Tax Board web page but including the additional data available
from the “Director’s
Table” drop down box. This analysis is slightly more complex
due to the fact that some towns have not done a reassessment
for a long time and so the properties are undervalued. A
correction factor must be applied in order to compare the
towns' tax rates on equal footing. The correction factor
is supplied in the data and is called the “Ratio
Assessed to True Value”; multiplying the different tax rates
by this correction factor allows a direct comparison of the
results. If you want to know how it works, think of it this
way: if a property is worth $100,000 and is assessed at $100,000,
a 0.5 tax rate would bring in $500 in taxes. If the property
was worth $100,000 but only assessed at $50,000, it would
only bring in $250 in taxes. In order to collect the correct
amount of taxes for this property, the tax rate would be
adjusted to 1.0. Of course, the rate is adjusted
for the entire aggregate of properties in the town, not on
an individual property basis.
In any case, our comparative tax rate analysis spreadsheet
can be viewed sorted
by School Tax rate and sorted
by Local Tax rate (the highest rates are at the top). You can
see that Aberdeen ranks as one of the highest taxed municipalities
in the County, and we do not believe that is anything to
brag about.
What about the Schools?
Since we are paying so much for schools, it would
be nice if we were among the top ranked in Monmouth County,
however that does not appear to be the case, as you can see
by viewing the 2006 rankings for our High
School (23rd lowest out of 29) , Middle
School (36th lowest out of 47), and Elementary
Schools (85th, 95th and 104th lowest out of 107).
Do you know what happens when the school budget is defeated in the
polls by the citizens of Aberdeen? It goes back to the Aberdeen and
Matawan councils for review. This is the chance for the Aberdeen Council,
Matawan Council and School Board to make real improvements to the
budget. The current Aberdeen Council apparently feels this problem
is too deep for them, or does not want to risk having their re-election
chances hurt by taking any responsibility at all for the school budget,
because they continually fail to propose any meaningful audit or engagement
in this all-important issue.
And then there was this vote…
During the March 20, 2007 Aberdeen Town Council meeting, a vote was
taken not to raise taxes, and it obviously passed, 2007 being an election
year. The happenings of that Council meeting are interesting, and
we urge you to read the first hand report.
Paid for by Aberdeen Green Party,
109 Wilson Ave., Aberdeen, NJ 07747
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