Benjamin Moore & Co. v. City of Newark

• Court: New Jersey Superior Court — Appellate Division
• Writing for the Court: CRAHAY
• Citation: Benjamin Moore & Co. v. City of Newark, 337 A.2d 371, 133 N.J.Super. 427 (N.J. Super. App. Div. 1975)
• Decision Date: 15 April 1975
• Parties: BENJAMIN MOORE & COMPANY, Petitioner-Appellant, v. CITY OF NEWARK, Respondent-Respondent.

Page 427

133 N.J.Super. 427

337 A.2d 371

BENJAMIN MOORE & COMPANY, Petitioner-Appellant, v. CITY OF NEWARK, Respondent-Respondent.

Superior Court of New Jersey Appellate Division.

Argued Jan. 7, 1975.

Decided April 15, 1975.

Carl G. Weisenfeld, Newark, for petitioner-appellant (Hannoch, Weisman, Stern & Besser, Newark, attorneys; Dean A. Gaver, Newark, on the brief).

Donald S. Coburn, Asst. Corp. Counsel, East Orange, for respondent-respondent (Donald E. Kink, Newark, attorney; Melvin Simon, Newark, on the brief).

Before Judges HALPERN, CRAHAY and ACKERMAN.

The opinion of the court was delivered by

CRAHAY, J.A.D.

Benjamin Moore & Company (the taxpayer) owns in excess of eight acres of land in the City of Newark (Newark) on which are situated, in the main, 14 older multistoried buildings utilized in the manufacture of paints and allied products. In this appeal it challenges the assessed valuations for the real property for the years 1970, 1971 and 1972 entered as final judgments in the Division of Tax Appeals. The hearing in the Division was bifurcated and the record essentially consists of the testimony of the taxpayer's expert, Charles Evans, taken on October 9, 1973, and that of the city's expert, Jack Birnholz, taken on December 18, 1973. At the conclusion of Birnholz's testimony the Division judge in an oral opinion entered the challenged assessments. The taxpayer's motion for a rehearing, alleging errors in the Division opinion, was denied.

Perceiving insufficient credible evidence in the record to support the Division's findings, and further finding that the conclusions do not fairly relate to the record, we are constrained to reverse the judgments under review and remand the matter for further proceedings. As was the case in Van Realty, Inc. v. Passaic, 117 N.J.Super. 425, 285 A.2d 52 (App.Div.1971), we have here, plainly and simply, no adequate 'findings of fact' nor any analytical expression of the basis which, applied to the found facts, led to the holdings below.

The hope--expressed in Van Realty that the reversals there might serve to alert the Division to its duty to make adequate findings of fact and to express reasons for its decisions--has not been fulfilled. We reiterate that there is a compelling need for quasi-judicial and administrative agencies to understand what constitutes adequate findings of fact, the practical reasons why they are mandated, the distinctions between ultimate and basic facts, and the necessity that the findings have evidentiary support.

Applying the Van Realty principles to the record before us we observe that the findings here were in the main conclusionary and lacked meaningful reference to the testimonial background.

By way of illustration only, we note that both expert witnesses were held by the Division judge to be highly competent but that they reached different appraisals of the property. The taxpayer's expert, Evans, employed both the market data approach (comparative sales) as well as the reconstruction cost approach in arriving at his valuations, although he heavily stressed the former methodology. The municipality's expert, Birnholz, relied on the comparative sales approach in ascertaining the value of the land but did not employ that method in the overall evaluation of the 'industrial manufacturing complex,' using instead the cost of reproduction less depreciation method of valuation. The Division judge observed in his opinion--and in our view incorrectly--that the experts substantially relied on the reconstruction cost approach in the evaluation of improvements. It strikes us that thereafter he undertook a seemingly gratuitous and conclusionary acceptance of the municipality's theories. (We note that Birnholz ultimately conceded that the reproduction cost method in the instant premises had little bearing on fair market value--the keystone to property evaluation. N.J.S.A. 54:4--23.) We see little record support for the reproduction cost analysis urged by Birnholz and accepted by the tribunal below, and no critical or comprehensive analysis of the comparative market approach employed by Evans with considerable record support. In re Appeal of City of East Orange, 103 N.J.Super. 109, 246 A.2d 722 (App.Div.1968). The failure by the judge below to...