The 1st of February — the day before Super Bowl Sunday — was the date the third payment was due on the 2013-’14 local real estate tax bill. If you own property in West Windsor or Plainsboro there’s no avoiding that inevitable fact. To make the whole tax matter even more unpalatable, it seems that real estate taxes always go up, never down.
Well, if you want to live in a “desirable” community like this, you should be willing to pay for it, right? Excellent schools, thoroughly provided municipal services, and all the other things that make the community what it is are paid for through our real estate taxes, and we should be happy to pay them. Uh, maybe not “happy,” but at least willing.
Why do most property owners say their taxes are always going up? Because it’s almost always true. Having lived in West Windsor for more than a half century, I have had the audacity to save all my tax bills — all 56 of them. Well, actually, I lost the 1969 bill. But I got the data on it from a friend years ago when I decided to do a little analysis to see where we were going and where we had been. So here is more of the same.
Incidentally, that was when I was on the school board and had to keep answering questions from people about why our school taxes were so high. Well, for one thing, I said, you want no more than 20 children in a classroom . . . and so on and so on.
If you will refer to the graph at right, you will see all the numbers in terms of percentage tax increases or decreases on a typical property since 1959. These data are based on the total tax rates, that is the cost of taxes in all the categories added together per $100 of assessed property value. The categories are Local Municipal Tax, Local Open Space Tax, Local School Tax, County Tax, County Open Space Tax, and County Library Tax. Until 1976 there was a small exemption if you were a senior citizen or a veteran.
Individual costs in tax dollars depend on the value of individual properties, and those are numbers that most people keep to themselves. Sometimes the amount someone actually pays may depend on an individual reappraisal that the township has made on their specific property in a specific year. Such a reappraisal may be the result of improvements made to the property. If the improvements involved something like building an addition to the house — an operation that would require a building permit — the township would know about it and be alerted to the possible need for an individual reappraisal and a change in the assessed value for tax purposes. But the tax rate applied each year is exactly the same for everyone.
The graph shows that only three times since 1959 has there been a decrease in the property tax on this house from year to year: in 1962, 1985, and 1993. In most years the increase has been less than 10 percent. Once, in 1963, the increase was over 30 percent. (For my house the total 1962 tax had been $266.80, and in 1963 it went up to $351.69! You should realize that gasoline cost around 30 cents a gallon then, so those amounts were not trivial.)
Since 1990, the tax increases have always been less than 10 percent, and in the past 10 years they have usually been less than 5 percent. The graph also shows the incidence of general property reassessments. That is the times when the township has had appraisers go around and decide whether the assessed value of each house should be changed to reflect changes in its structure and features — any items that were not covered by an individual reappraisal.
The reassessments also reflect changes in the local real estate market and the overall economy, something that is usually reflected in the consumer price index (CPI). Reassessments have been done in 1982, 1992, and 2005. It’s not clear that there has been any significant change in the data for this house that could be traced to these reassessments, though during the late 1960s and early ’70s, the tax jumped around a lot. But there’s no evidence that was due to the reassessments. Since 1993 things have settled down quite nicely.
Over all, it seems that the tax picture is relatively stable, at least more so in the past decade than it was before. That may be due more to national economic conditions than it is to local policy.
