Tax equity

Property owners will be able to question Middlesex tax assessor Dawn Guttschall about the coming reassessment when she attends the Borough Council’s Tuesday, Sept. 24 session.

The meeting will be held at 7 p.m. at the Ronald S. Dobies municipal building.

This month, the borough is launching the reassessment, which will see the first 20% of Middlesex properties get inspected. The visits are part of a five-year cycle of all properties being inspected to keep their assessed values current with market conditions.

The initial visits will occur in a 70-block section in the northeastern portion of Middlesex, along the Green Brook border. 

The intended reassessment was not mentioned at several meetings last spring when officials discussed the 2024 budget and related taxes. The reassessment spurred a social media furor last month after homeowners in the initial inspection zone received letters from the borough.

Homeowners undergoing the initial inspections, expressed concerns that their tax bills would increase, and do so more quickly than taxpayers undergoing later years’ visits. The council’s Aug. 27 meeting included nearly one hour of public comments and questions, all of them related to the reassessment or taxation. Guttschall did not attend.

Officials have said that properties won’t experience a tax hike simply due to the inspections. A combination of factors dictate whether there is a tax increase.

The reassessment is part of a renewed borough effort to keep property values current. It comes two years after the completion of a comprehensive revaluation that involved the visitation of all properties in short order. Those new property values became official in 2023.

That effort cost the borough about $300,000, an expense that officials look to avoid going forward. Prior to the 2022 revaluation, it had been roughly 36 years since the previous effort to update Middlesex Borough values. 

Mayor Jack Mikolajczyk said it’s “far less costly” to do a cyclical reassessment versus a revaluation. Officials have not specified the expected yearly cost of the new reassessment.

The mayor noted that cyclical reassessments are already being conducted in neighboring municipalities. Mikolajczyk said regulations allow for only a one-year gap between a revaluation and starting a cyclical reassessment. That means the borough needs to begin a reassessment in 2024 if it wants to use them going forward.

Mikołajczyk acknowledged this week that August’s announcement of the reassessment’s pending start, was not handled well.

“In hindsight, we could have done a better job rolling this out,” Mikolajczyk said at the council’s Sept. 10 session. “But we’ve got our ducks in a row now. At the end, this is going to be equitable and fair for all residents.”

While opining during public comments that the rollout was lacking, the mayor did not lay blame on anyone specifically.

“It was bantered around and basically last year – when we did the revaluation – is when we started talking about it,” Mikolajczyk said, “because the reassessment is an actual ongoing process that’s a lot less expensive.” 

“It’s a lot fairer. It’s a lot more equitable and it basically saves a heck of a lot of money,” he added.

Asked when officials learned of the September launch, the mayor replied, “We probably knew earlier this year.”

“When it came out, it’s like, ‘Oh, I almost forgot all about that,’ “ Mikolajczyk added. 

“It was something that should have been on the highlight reel and it just got by,” the mayor said. “We should never have rollouts like that and that’s what we’re trying to correct. We’ve got to improve on that and we will.”

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