East Brunswick Officials Blame Bottleneck for Long-Delayed Property Tax Revaluations
Officials say the pool of state-approved revaluation firms is too small to keep up with demand. East Brunswick, overdue since 1983, is stuck on the waitlist.
A for-sale sign in front of a home in Eugene, Oregon. (Credit: Rick Obst)
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Chris Howell | August 11, 2026
East Brunswick has wanted to do a townwide property revaluation for at least a year, officials said. It’s still waiting, not because the township hasn’t tried, but because officials say there’s almost no one left in New Jersey to hire.
“We’ve gone out to secure a company to do that, but there’s so few of them that we are on a waiting list,” Mayor Brad Cohen told the Township Council on Monday.
Council President Dana Zimbicki said the shortage isn’t unique to East Brunswick. At the meeting, she put the number of companies statewide that perform municipal revaluations at two. The state’s own list tells a somewhat different story. New Jersey’s Division of Taxation shows about 10 approved revaluation firms as of October 2025.
That bottleneck is holding up overdue towns across New Jersey, not just East Brunswick, Zimbicki said. State records show that at least 17 municipalities in Middlesex County alone have received special exemptions allowing them to put off revaluations. Only two municipalities, Middlesex and Piscataway, have undergone recent revals.
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Business Administrator Joseph Criscuolo said the township has already requested a cost estimate from a firm and is still waiting to hear back.
The disclosure came during public comment. Resident Michael Delucia asked whether East Brunswick would follow neighboring Freehold Township, which also just completed a reassessment. Delucia said he’s aware of the assessed value of one Freehold property increasing by as much as $4,000.
East Brunswick hasn’t done a townwide revaluation since 1983. Cohen said the county has put the township “on warning” that it is “long, long, long overdue.”
The state’s 2026 equalization table for Middlesex County (the standard measure of how assessed values compare to true market value) puts East Brunswick’s ratio at 17.44%, down from roughly 18.83% the year before. That means most properties are assessed at under a fifth of what they’d actually sell for. Cohen called the gap “screaming to be done.”
Zimbicki said the council has been discussing a revaluation internally for about a year.
Criscuolo cautioned against comparing East Brunswick directly to Freehold. The township sits in Monmouth County, which has its own process for property value assessments. He cited his own past work overseeing revaluations as an administrator in Aberdeen, also in Monmouth County, and Piscataway, in Middlesex County.
Cohen insisted that a revaluation doesn’t mean every bill goes up by the same amount, or at all. “I can’t tell you how anybody’s property is going to change,” he said. “Some will go up, some will go down, and most will stay probably about the same.”
A revaluation resets assessments to reflect current market value. Afterward, municipalities recalibrate their tax rate based on the total levy needed. A property’s bill changes based on how its value shifted relative to the townwide average, not simply because the assessed number grew larger.
Editor’s note: The Central Jerseyan is free to read and supported by advertising. If you value this kind of local reporting and want to help sustain it, you can become a citizen supporter on Patreon. Your contribution helps fund continued coverage of local government, schools, and community issues.