Monday, September 12, 2016

City Council Meets Tonight

Tonight's City Council meeting only requires roll call or voice votes on eight of 24 resolutions. The rest will be passed in one consent vote. There is also one ordinance.

Councilman Barry Goode will discuss a "community beautification initiative."

See the Sept. 12 agenda here.

The meeting is 8 p.m. in Municipal Court, 325 Watchung Ave.


5 comments:

  1. Why is it the only committee to issue updates is public safety?

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    1. You would have to ask the other committee chairs that question.

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  2. So, this isn't super relevant to this post but here goes.

    I've lived in North Plainfield for around 5 years, give or take. Myself and my girlfriend are looking at buying a house and settling down.

    We decided to take a look at places near me and found a place around Watchung Ave and 22 that looked ideal. On the lower end of our price range(we're trying to keep it between 150k-200k), it needed fixing but nothing we weren't willing to tackle, overall a nice place that we were going to move forward with.

    Until we saw the tax bill. For some reason this house(which has never sold for more than 260k and usually has hovered around the 150k mark) has been assessed at over 300k which means that the purchaser would end up doubling the monthly payment.

    We did some more looking at other houses, paying attention to the relationship between the historical house price and the assessed price and realized this is extremely common, particularly in the North Plainfield area.

    Because of the high assessment rates, we are no longer looking in the Plainfield area. Instead we are elsewhere where we can find a fixer upper at a reasonable price without doubling our monthly payments due to taxes.

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    Replies
    1. Anonymous 9:19 AM, North Plainfield, South Plainfield and Plainfield are three different counties. Somerset, Middlesex and Union respectively. Taxes rates and assessments vary from each county. Did your realtor not explain this to you? You may want to get a new realtor.

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    2. You want to look at the annual property tax itself and compare to similar properties, as assessed values and tax rates vary from town to town. If tax out of line with comparable properties, you can appeal the assessment. Talk with tax assessor or see attorney.

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