We must persuade Orange to cut budget

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Due to the events occurring at Orange's town forum on revaluation on Sept. 26, it seems prudent to address the matter in a coherent manner to enable some understanding on the part of the public and provide some direction to the public.

Over the past 42 years, during which Orange was not in compliance with the state's law to revalue its properties, many commercial property owners won tax appeals, against the city, because of a lack of revaluation.

Those owners received significant refunds, and the taxpayers paid for those refunds and the concurrent legal fees through increased taxes.

As a 16-year member of the city council, I spoke about this over the years. This was a bit of information that was missing from the earlier forum on revaluation.

So even without revaluation, taxes were rising in Orange.

Now let's look at the proposed lawsuit being considered. When the city is sued because it did what the state required, the city's lawyers will have to defend against the suit, at the regular billing rate, whether or not they use outside counsel. Again, your taxes will increase. But let's look at the tax situation.

How does the city develop the tax rate, hence, the taxes, for property owners? Without going into too much detail, the Local Finance Board in Essex County divides the reappraised value of Orange's taxable property into the budget amount "to be raised by local taxes."

This "strikes" the tax rate which is then applied to each owner's assessed value and yields the taxes for the property. So it's easy to see that as the budget increases, taxes increase. The mayor (proposed) the budget on Sept. 5. It is now in the hands of the council to review and revise before it is adopted and becomes official.

The public needs to organize and convince the council to cut the budget. The city may be living too extravagantly at this current time. It has often been said that the basic responsibilities to government are police, fire, public works and health.

-- William R. Lewis, Orange