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Gloucester City Mayor/Council Continue to Pummel Residents with Highest Taxes in NJ

Monday, May 08, 2023

GLOUCESTER CITY NO. 23:

The City of Gloucester City is so poor it qualifies to be a UEZ Zone and an ABBOTT District !!!

GLOUCESTER CITY, NJ (May 8, 2023)(CNBNews)--People living in the state of New Jersey continue to pay the highest property taxes in the country, according to NJ.com. The average bill in 2022 rose to almost $10,000, or to be exact $9,490.

A homeowner’s bill is determined by the rate a municipality charges and how much the town says a home is worth. In some towns, the value of a home is based on what it would sell for on the market. In others, the length of time since the last revaluation is the driving factor, leading to lower assessed values and often higher tax rates.

NJ.com looked at the tax rate for all 565 towns and narrowed that number down to the 30 communities that pay the highest tax bill.

As in the past, the City of Gloucester City is once again named.

Keep in mind that the people residing there are so poor the community has been designated as a Urban Enterprise Zone (UEZ ). An Urban Enterprise Zone is an area within a municipality (or group of municipalities) in New Jersey suffering from economic distress. There are only 32 active zones in 37 municipalities throughout the state. (READ MORE)

CNBNews graphic file

Even so, the people living in GLOUCESTER CITY continue to be in the top 30 paying the highest in property taxes. As far as we have been able to determine the governing body of this city has been socking it to Gloucester City residents since 2018; maybe longer.

Residents in the City of Gloucester City are so poor the community has the distinction of being an ABBOTT district.

The following criteria must be met to qualify for an ABBOT district:

must be those with the lowest socio-economic status, thus assigned to the lowest categories on the New Jersey Department of Education's District Factor Groups (DFG) scale;
"evidence of a substantive failure of thorough and efficient education;" including "failure to achieve what the DOE considers passing levels of performance on the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA);"
have a large percentage of disadvantaged students who need "an education beyond the norm;"
existence of an "excessive tax [for] municipal services" in the locality where the district is located.^[

Take note that two of the stipulations that must be met to be named an ABBOTT are "evidence of a substantive failure of educating students and the “existence of an excessive tax for municipal services.”

With criteria like that, there is no incentive to raise student test scores or is there an incentive for Gloucester City’s mayor and council to curb spending and lower property taxes? If that happened the school district would no longer qualify for the millions of dollars they receive in state school funding.

Besides Gloucester City, the other communities named in the TOP 30 that HOME OWNERS pay the highest taxes are:

30- Clementon

29-Roselle

28-Oaklyn

27-Pine Hill

26-Stratford

25-Irvington

24-Woodbury Heights

23-Gloucester City

22-Hampton

21-Westville

20-Paulsboro