With unemployment rising and businesses in New Jersey still closed, an executive order that lets municipalities decide whether to extend the property tax due date from May 1 to June 1 doesn’t do enough for cash-strapped constituents, a local policy group says.
“While the pandemic is no one’s fault in New Jersey, the policies and decisions made by [Gov. Phil Murphy] lay squarely in his lap,” Regina M. Egea, president of the Garden State Initiative (GSI), said in an email response to The Center Square. “This Executive Order, consistent with his inclination to defer decisions rather than affirmatively plot a positive direction, puts on display his lack of appreciation of the scope of the economic damage his administration has been creating since taking office.”
The order gives the choice to local governing bodies, not individual taxpayers, Egea said.
“It’s better to focus on the big picture, not a headline grabbing measure that is more symbolic than actually offering real relief to taxpayers.”
A greater need in the short-term is assuring residents can access unemployment benefits, Egea said.
“Current employees in Motor Vehicles (closed since March 15th) or Taxation (deferred all tax collections to July and the budget to August) as well as multiple other departments who no longer have active clients, need to be assigned to complete this work instead of hiring new employees or contracting with outside call centers as our Commissioner of Labor has indicated he is doing,” she said.
Even more important, New Jersey homeowners need reductions to their highest-in-the-nation property taxes, Egea said.
According to a Tax Foundation report from February, the New Jersey property tax rate is 2.13 percent.
“In recent days, there has been much discussion of how Governor Murphy is utilizing the over $2 billion in aid New Jersey received under the federal CARES Act,” Egea said. “He has held the funds for the state in lieu of an additional package to bail out the state’s budget shortfall. It has been noted by Sen. Declan O’Scanlon that some of the aid was to go to assist local governments with their expenses.
“Should the Governor release some of those funds to local governments, it would increase their flexibility in the short term,” she added. “Immediately though, the Governor, all municipalities, and school boards need to work creatively on how to actually lower property taxes to demonstrate that they know how to respond to the dramatic changes that now constitute the ‘new normal’ of the lives and livelihoods of their constituents,” Egea said.
