Group discusses lawsuit about tax revaluation

Members of the Princeton Fair Tax-Revaluation Group expressed disagreement with the Joint Revaluation Study Commission’s conclusions and voiced concerns over the way some of the University’s properties were valued at a special meeting on Thursday night, which included around 50 attendees.

PFTRG recently announced its intention to take legal action against the Borough, the Township and Appraisal Systems, Inc., the company that carried out the revaluation process, in protest against the increased property values that many residents saw as a result. In the lawsuit, the group also challenges the University’s tax-exempt status on many of its properties, such as Chancellor Green and the Frist Campus Center.

On Thursday, many members of the group said they disagreed with the conclusion of the Joint Revaluation Study Commission, a commission of representatives appointed by both governing bodies, that the methods and results of the revaluation were “difficult to challenge.”

“Frankly, we totally disagree with that,” Dale Meade said. “We believe it is not only easy, but we feel compelled to challenge those methods and results.”

“A major redo of the revaluation is required,” PFTRG leader Jim Firestone said, calling for a review of the valuations of all properties. He said he was disappointed that the governing bodies had recommended against challenging the revaluation process. “The governing bodies will never do this on their own, never,” he said. “The residents will have to lead the way on this, and hopefully the governing bodies will follow.

“I have here a package of data that’s so big that that commission never covered anything like this, never went near it,” Firestone added, referring to data that, he said, PFTRG brought to the Revaluation Study Commission’s attention but that the commission did not consider.

Firestone said he was particularly seeking to appeal the revaluation of the Stanworth Apartments, University-owned properties in the Borough that house faculty and staff. The appraisers of the revaluation valued similar properties near the Stanworth Apartments at $270,000 but valued the University’s properties at around $60,000.

“They always said that they’d pay their fair share of housing because there are students that they send to our school system out of those houses,” Firestone said, referring to the University’s agreement to pay the property taxes on certain graduate student housing that would qualify for exemption but that the University has voluntarily kept on the tax rolls because children of graduate students could attend the local public schools.

“The trouble is, what they think their fair share is is according to any loophole they can find. As in, ‘They’re all on one lot, and who would buy our lot, Yale or Harvard, or some investor or something like that?’ And so they get taxed minusculy compared to you, and yet their kids have gone to your school system for how many years?” Firestone said to the audience assembled at the meeting. “I want to see them pay for what they’ve imposed upon us all those years.”

Firestone then read a letter from PFTRG’s attorney, Bill Potter ’68, stating PFTRG’s case as a charge against the Borough and Township for “arbitrary and capricious decision-making, the basis for overturning governmental decisions that are not soundly reasoned and not adequately supported by substantial and credible evidence.” Potter is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

In the letter, Potter recommended that PFTRG write letters of complaint to the Borough Council and Township Committee seeing whether they wished to settle out of court.

Meade said he took issue with the commission’s judgment that ASI’s revaluations were appropriate because they correlated with figures in the sales from the past year. He said that comparisons to that data were not an appropriate way to gauge the revaluation’s accuracy because half of the sales figures used were from the same time that the revaluation was in process. The sales sample was less than 1 percent, he added.

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Meade also said that he had requested ASI’s internal review of their process but had been told that the documents were protected under attorney-client privilege.

“We asked for a copy of their internal review report, and they said, ‘No, you can’t have that because that’s protected by attorney-client privilege.’ I mean, come on,” Meade said. “If you were running a company that was under criticism for not delivering a decent product, wouldn’t you deliver the documenting evidence to say, ‘This is how we did it, it’s rock-solid’?” Meade added. “The fact that they refused to provide this information to me is, again, suggestive that they don’t have a good case.”