Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop is “not a supporter” of a new bill introduced by three Hudson County legislators that would temporarily halt property revaluations so that residents have time to adjust to the “fiscal shock.”Â
By John Heinis/Hudson County View
Bill S-2566, introduced by state Senators Brian Stack (D-33), also the Union City Mayor, and Sandra Cunningham (D-31), would potentially take effect immediately and would allow municipalities to postpone applying reval results until January 2019 – as long as those results were not applied to tax bills before April of this year.
Meanwhile, Assemblyman Raj Mukherji (D-33), has introduced the legislation in the state’s lower house.
“This bill would delay the implementation of certain property tax revaluations to provide municipal governing bodies, the Division of Taxation, and the Legislature additional time to limit fiscal shock associated with implementing revaluations,” the bill description says.
While Stack, Cunningham and Mukherji were not immediately available to comment, Stack said at a community meeting in Jersey City’s Ward C last week that he planned on addressing residents’ reval woes soon.
” … I’m also looking at legislation that would address exactly what you’re talking about: that instead of waiting 20 or 30 or 40 years, that we could possibly maybe do something what they call a rolling reval that we’re looking at – possibly other states may be doing,” Stack said (h/t Speak NJ).
” … Where the reval is done every three years so the impact isn’t as severe as it is here in Jersey City.”
Stack’s legislative district includes the Jersey City Heights and Ward E, the latter of which having generally felt the most drastic effects of this year’s reval – the first one in the city since 1988.
Responding to the legislation on Twitter, Fulop said he would prefer just to get the reval over with at this point, rather than implementing more delays in the 11th hour.
“I’m not a supporter of delaying it further. It’s been 30 years + our team has done the work to do it properly/fairly. At this point we would not like to see any further delay. The bill is well intended but I think mechanics would make it more difficult,” he wrote.
The mayor’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the tweet.
In his State of the City address in February, Fulop said that he wanted to implement a second reval next year to ease the rising tax burden on city residents, but he revealed on a March episode of Hudson County Review Live that he would not pursue that idea after it was shot down by the city council.
[fve]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUalMPeulJ4[/fve]
