Perhaps I can decipher the budget enough to break out the state and county PILOT revenue numbers and put it in a follow-on analysis. Likely I’ll do this as part of the review of the 2009 Budget.

It’s fair to treat this revenue differently than all the other state and county aid.

I also wrote about the State office buildings because the State negotiates what is effectively a large PILOT agreement with the city- and while I don’t know the number off hand, its a pretty big component of our “State-Aid”. That money should never dry-up- unless all State offices evacuate the city. It is another variable- the amount is usually touted as being much lower than a normal ratable would bear by the City- but there is not much leverage to negotiate a better deal. I’m remembering this information from years ago- so correct me if I’m way off!

Keep up these posts- they are eye opening.

-sd

Please don’t be one of those people who use the “state government” excuse for Trenton’s lack of ratables.

There is no crowding out effect from government buildings. Trenton simply has a large proportion of undeveloped or underdeveloped land. Also, there’s no reason to think downtown is particularly valuable unless you have data to back it up (certainly would be a worthwhile study).

Apparently TDA is doing a study of occupancy rates and hopefully rents. Perhaps this study will make your point. However, my guess is that other neighborhoods have higher residential values (my properties alone point to that) and also higher commercial values.

Every one of us in Trenton and especially the Mayor’s office need to get off the bandwagon blaming lack of ratables on the state. It’s just not the problem.

That said, state policy is a large part of the problem. The state is the principal culprit in funding affordable housing in Trenton, it built the highway’s that tore the city into pieces, it owns the surface lots that are death to development and it implemented the tax and spending policies that led to NJ’s sprawl.

There’s plenty the state of NJ has done to mess up Trenton but locating the Capitol there isn’t one of them. And even if we’d be better off without the Capitol, there’s just not anything we can do about it so we’d better just move on.

It would be very interesting to try to compile a map of Trenton that indicates exactly how much of the 7+ square miles contributes towards ratables. You are correct in that ratables are not the solution to our financial woes, but I would guess that only 20-30% of the Trenton land mass is currently generating property taxes.

-sd

And also — let’s reinvent Trenton without dissing Camden! Things are really, really bad there, for sure, but “ceases to be livable” is a probably too simplistic a way to put it, since after all some 80,000 souls did live there in 2000. True that many had no economic choice about it, given how young, poor and uneducated they were on average, but even then, there are many pockets of civility and virtue and possibly even more choice than one gives credit for.

One thing Trenton has going for it vs. Camden is a notably better housing stock. Camden is full of firetrap wooden row houses and undesirable 2-story bricks (both remnants of cheap shipyard housing), whereas Trenton has ample architectural diversity and much higher quality overall.

However, one thing that Camden has that Trenton does not (to my knowledge) is a pretty cool website CAMConnect, an urban indicators project hosted by Cooper Hospital. Talk about looking bad news squarely in the face… take a look at the neighborhood-by-neighborhood data. I wonder who will host a similar project for Trenton, since the city administration cannot manage this task itself? In fact, it could and should be done better in Trenton, maybe with assistance from one of the county’s several universities.