Atl. City Electric Co. v. Harbor Tp., 207.

• Decision Date: 30 December 1946
• Docket Number: No. 207.,207.
• Parties: ATLANTIC CITY ELECTRIC CO. v. EGG HARBOR TP. et al.
• Court: New Jersey Supreme Court

135 N.J.L. 60

50 A.2d 476

ATLANTIC CITY ELECTRIC CO.

v.EGG HARBOR TP. et al.

No. 207.

Supreme Court of New Jersey.

Dec. 30, 1946.

Certiorari proceeding to review a tax assessment by the Atlantic City Electric Company against Egg Harbor Township, a municipal corporation, and the Division of Tax Appeals in the State Department of Taxation and Finance.

Decision in accordance with opinion.

October term, 1946, before BODINE and WACHENFELD, JJ.

Lloyd, Horn & Perskie, of Atlantic City (John Lloyd, Jr., of Atlantic City, of counsel), for prosecutor.

William Charlton, of Atlantic City, for respondents.

WACHENFELD, Justice.

The question presented to this court by the writ of certiorari is the validity of a tax assessment on the prosecutor's property made by the respondent Egg Harbor Township on October 1, 1943, for the taxable year 1944.

Prosecutor is an electric company owning, inter alia, a high tension line which runs across the southerly part of the State from prosecutor's generating plant on the Delaware River at Deepwater, New Jersey, to prosecutor's plant at Atlantic City, New Jersey. The land in question is part of that upon which the high tension line stands and lies within an area in Egg Harbor Township locally described as ‘Pleasantville Terrace.’ It is a strip two hundred feet wide and approximately two miles long containing fifty-five acres, and there is nothing on the land except the high tension line. A nearby swamp touches upon the strip in two places and the surface of the land is covered with scrub.

Pleasantville Terrace is an old real estate development started in 1903, at which time a map was filed, but since 1910 has been inactive. Most of the original streets have been overgrown and only a few houses exist in the whole development. The greater part of the area is ordinary woodland which has been burnt over and has upon it only scrub oaks and pine.

Prosecutor's land is crossed by roads at the east and west ends and approximately in the middle. The land was acquired and high tension lines erected thereon in 1930, and from 1935 through 1943 the respondent assessed the land as acreage at an assessed valuation of $2500 for the whole area, which averaged $45.50 per acre, there being approximately fifty-five acres. For the year 1944 respondent township broke down the assessment into individual lots as shown on the old real estate development and increased the assessment from $2500 to $16,600, an increase of six hundred per cent, or $300 per acre. The reason given was that other lot owners in Pleasantville Terrace were assessed at $25 per lot; but such assessments, it was openly admitted, were only made against taxpaying lots while lots owned by defaulting taxpayers were assessed at a valuation of $1.

On the prosecutor's appeal the County Board reduced the total of assessments from $16,600 to $14,000 without specifying as to where or how the reduction should be applied. On prosecutor's further appeal the Division of Tax Appeals arbitrarily reduced the assessments by cutting each exactly in half, arriving at an aggregate of $8300. On this basis prosecutor's 1944 assessment is still more than three hundred per cent above what it was for the nine prior years.

The standard to be applied in the determination of this case is set forth in Article 4, Section 7, Paragraph 12, of the New Jersey Constitution, which provides that property shall be assessed for taxes according to its true value, and R.S. 54:4-23, N.J.S.A., which provides:

‘The assessor shall * * * determine the full and fair value of each parcel of real property situate in the taxing district at such price as, in his judgment, it would sell for at a fair and bona fide sale by private contract on October first next preceding the date on which the...