John Bendall owner of Re/Max Classic Group discusses the pros and cons of a property tax credit.

There are a lot of wonderful things about living in Central New Jersey; the property taxes are not one of them.  There are many nice things that our property taxes afford us, good school systems, parks and recreation areas, clean and safe communities, but these things definitely come at a cost to New Jersey residents.  In past years some of the burden of high property taxes has been alleviated by property tax rebate checks.  If you are like me you may have wondered why they don’t just lower taxes instead of wasting the time and labor it must take to mail those checks out.

When Governor Corzine was running for office one of the things he promised to do was to replace those checks with direct credits.  Seems like a no brainer, right?  Well as with all things bureaucratic there are some challenges.  There seems to be a matter of privacy at hand.  If credits are offered the amount of the credit would appear on public tax records.  Anyone could look at the amount of the credit and then determine the approximate household income of the recipient.  There is also an argument that no time or money would be saved as homeowners would be mailed a letter regarding their credit in place of a check.  While it is possible that the credits may be adopted there are still a lot of issues to work out before any decision is made.

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