Residents Receive Grace Period to Pay Property Tax Bill

Bridgewater property owners have been given a grace period until Aug. 30 to pay their quarterly property bills.

The Township Council approved the grace period on Monday evening.

Township Administrator Jim Naples said on Monday that the municipality had just received the final property tax rate from the Somerset County Board of Taxation, which determines the tax rates for all of the county’s 21 municipalities.

The tax bills are expected to be mailed in the middle of next week, Naples said.

The township’s new tax rate, which went into effect on July 1, is $2.051 per $100 of assessed property value. That is a 4.27 percent increase over the previous rate of $1.967. A new tax rate becomes effective on July 1 because that is when the fiscal years for the state and school districts begin.

A house assessed at $500,000 will have an annual property bill of $10,250.

Driving the increase is a 4.6 percent hike in the regional school tax from $1.324 per $100 of assessed value to $1.386. The school tax is the largest component of the property tax bill.

The second largest part of the tax bill is the county tax. The new county rate is .328 per $100 of assessed value, up 3.4 percent from .317.

Municipal taxes, which fund the police department, public works, recreation programs and other services, only account for one eighth of the property tax bill. The municipal purpose tax rate is going up 4.4 percent from .247 per $100 of assessed value to .258.

The tax rates were calculated by using the total value of property in the township. The total value of property in the township is $8,100,156,601, which among the county’s municipalities, is second only to the total value of land in Franklin.