Hillsborough showed up on property taxes — NJ used to do this a lot

Aleicia Uccardi has lived in Hillsborough for nearly 19 years, has three kids in the school district, and by her own account was as shocked as anyone when her third-quarter property tax bill showed up. What she did next is the part worth paying attention to. She helped organize a group of concerned neighbors that grew past 500 people in a single week, and when she stood up at the July 28 Township Committee meeting, she didn't come in swinging. "We are not here to complain," she told the committee. "We are here because we want to work with you on finding solutions."

That's it. That's the whole model. Show up, bring your neighbors, ask for transparency, and stay in the room long enough to actually get answers instead of just venting into a microphone. Uccardi asked the committee to make tax relief and long-term fiscal sustainability central priorities in future budgets. Another resident, Kumarabel Nagarajan, pushed for real clarity on how the township's annual reassessment process actually works, and got a direct answer from the CFO about why it's done the way it is. Nobody stormed out. Nobody needed to.

Ej with Jim Gearhart in 2013 in AC. Jim lead the early 90's tax revolt on NJ101.5 | photo by EJ

This is where New Jersey 101.5 comes from

I didn't personally live through what happened here in 1990, but it's baked into the DNA of this station, and I've heard the story enough times from the people who did to know exactly what it means. Governor Jim Florio pushed through a $2.8 billion tax increase that year, the largest state tax hike in the country at the time, extending the sales tax to things like toilet paper along the way. WKXW was, at that point, an obscure Trenton oldies station nobody outside the area had heard of. Then the phones started ringing. A caller named John Budzash, along with Pat Ralston, turned that anger into a group called Hands Across New Jersey, and by that July, thousands of people were rallying on the Statehouse steps in Trenton. "Florio Free in '93" became the rallying cry. Listenership at the station quadrupled, from 150,000 to 600,000, in the span of that fight. Florio's approval rating collapsed from 42 percent to 18 percent by that fall. He lost re-election in 1993. Legendary morning host Jim Gearhart called it the spark that put this station on the map, and thirty-six years later, that's still exactly what we are.

SEE ALSO: Your ANCHOR letter is landing in NJ mailboxes this month 

Statistics from the state DCA and NCES. (Canva)

The number hasn't gotten any smaller

The average New Jersey property tax bill topped $10,500 last year, the second straight year it's crossed five figures, and there's no relief program on the books that makes that number comfortable. I've written plenty this summer about ANCHOR letters and Stay NJ and Q3 deadlines, and every one of those pieces exists because that number keeps climbing and people keep needing to understand what to do about it.

What Hillsborough got right isn't that people were angry. Plenty of towns are angry. It's that 500 neighbors turned that anger into a room full of specific, answerable questions, asked with enough respect that the people on the other side of the dais actually answered them. That's not a smaller version of 1990. That's the same instinct, aimed better. New Jersey residents found their voice once because a talk radio station gave them a place to be loud. Hillsborough just proved you don't need the radio station to still know how to use it.