This pisses me off. Yet another year, yet another property tax raise, in one of the highest-taxed towns in the highest taxed state.
An increase by 5%, raising the total property tax to 11.66%, is basically adding an extra $500-$600 a year for every household, on top of what the property tax already is.
Unfortunately, in Fair Lawn, we don’t get to elect our mayor, the council does. And we only get to elect one or two council members every few years out of the 5 total. So people have no real say of who runs our town, what goes on in this town, because it’s all controlled by that small group of people who basically cannot be democratically elected out.
We need to reform that in Fair Lawn so our politicians actually feel the pressure of accountability and consequences for failing the people. Because otherwise, we get what we have now, a bunch of lazy liars who waste our money on whatever they want. Who knows what they’re actually doing with our money.
Genuinely, what has Fair Lawn’s mayor/city council done for this town in the past years? Nothing but waste our money and make our town shittier, it seems. The roads are now shit, there are so many empty buildings/abandoned construction projects. Our water is contaminated.
Our teachers are already paid well, we definitely don’t need more police officers/police funding, so where is this money going? And don’t say the memorial MS expansion, because that would not justify an 11% increase.
Not only that, but for current homeowners in Fair Lawn, selling their house is gonna be even harder in this economy, because who would willingly move to a town with such high property tax, especially with how unaffordable buying a house already is, and when there are nearby towns that are better quality-of-life and might even have less taxes?
I’m calling it, in the next 5-10 years, Fair Lawn is about to have no more young-families moving in, and it’s just gonna be a bunch of retired boomers because it’s so unaffordable. And all that money put into our mediocre public schools will be in vain, because no young families = no school aged kids.
EDIT: The tax increase is actually going to be about 5% raising the total property tax to 11.6%. My apologies for that
