Three changes, none of which needed a change in state law. Set them yourself and watch what happens to what the Township collects, and to what the school district gets. Everything else is held at the figures from the documents.
This page models the contracts, not the cash. For what the Township actually banked each year, audited and undisputed, see what was collected.
This is not an assumption or a modelling choice, it is how the statute works. Everything on this page below follows from it.
| What is taxed | A home in Robbinsville | A property under a long-term agreement |
|---|---|---|
| The land | Assessed at value. Taxed. Split between the township, the county and the schools. | The same. The land is never exempt. |
| The building | Assessed at value. Taxed. Split the same three ways. | Exempt. In its place, a negotiated Annual Service Charge, a share of the rent roll, not of the value, of which 95% goes to the municipality, 5% to the county and nothing to the school district. |
So the quarrel is not that these properties pay nothing. They pay a great deal, this page puts a number on it. The quarrel is with how the building is priced and where that money goes. It is priced off the rent roll rather than the value, so it does not track what the property is worth.
And this is the part that reaches your own tax bill. A school budget is not reduced because a building is exempt. The levy is set, and it is then raised across the district’s taxable ratables. Take a property assessed near ninety million dollars out of that base for twenty years and the same levy is spread across everything still in it, which, in Robbinsville, is overwhelmingly houses. Commercial ratables exist to carry load so that homeowners carry less. A property outside the base carries none of it.
The statute exists for a reason, and the reason deserves a fair hearing: redevelopment of underused land is supposed to need an inducement, and without one the argument runs that nothing gets built and the township taxes a vacant field instead. That case can be made honestly. What we cannot find is anywhere it was made in public, with the arithmetic attached, before these agreements were signed. And even granting it in full, thirty years at a tenth of the rent, with the building outside the ratable base the whole time, was never the only deal that satisfied it.
The Liberty/McKesson abatement ran five years and that property is back on the normal rolls today. Ordinance 2018-18 ran eleven. Thirty years is a choice, not a requirement, and the longer the term, the more of it falls on whoever is paying taxes here in 2050.
This clause already exists in every agreement in the file. It is simply switched off until year fifteen or later. It is the only clause tied to the building’s value rather than its rent roll. A developer who cannot carry a set share of a tax bill from the start has a financing problem, not a tax problem.
The statutory 95/5/0 split governs the service charge itself. It does not prevent a separately negotiated payment to the district written into the financial agreement. Sixteen agreements in the file, and not one of them asks.
Every document behind this page, the agreements, the ordinances, and twelve years of Township audits, is available from the campaign on request.
Every figure on this page comes from a document you can open, or from arithmetic on one. The tax rates are from the New Jersey Division of Taxation. The agreement terms and the Annual Service Charge schedule are from the Township of Robbinsville's own records, obtained under the Open Public Records Act on April 12, 2026, and available from this campaign on request.
If you find an error on this page, tell us and we will correct it in public.