Built from official public records · every figure links to its source
Jersey City's budget crisis isn't bad luck. It's a machine that runs on one-time money.
The city spent $667 million of one-time money on everyday bills — its own report says so. Now the money's gone, your taxes are up 15%, and the hole is still there.
These are lawful budgeting practices. This project describes a structural problem — not wrongdoing by any person, official, or company. Statements that a practice is “unsustainable” are opinion; the figures are the government's own. Read the disclaimer ↗
If you read nothing else, read this. Every line links to an official source.
What happened? Jersey City is broke. The budget sprang a $255 million leak — 28% of the whole thing — and City Hall reached for your wallet: a 20% tax hike, haggled down to 15% only after Trenton tossed a lifeline that's mostly a loan. School taxes had already quadrupled. City announcement ↗
How did Jersey City go broke?
Trenton pulled the school money. Trenton's 2018 “S2” law cut Jersey City's school aid from $410M to $130M a year — and school taxes more than quadrupled to fill the hole. See the numbers
City Hall paid everyday bills with one-time cash. It sold land, borrowed, and drained savings — about $667M (2019–2025) — to cover costs that come back every year. That money is gone; the bills aren't. City's own report ↗
The music stopped in 2026. The gap hit $255M — answered with a 15% tax hike and a $120M state package, $105M of which is a loan. An ~$80M hole remains for next year. City announcement ↗
The biggest bills are hidden in the footnotes. A $1B retiree-health liability, $600M+ in pensions, and authority debt never appear in the budget the council votes on. City audit ↗
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2019: the city budget, fully furnished…
You got the bill: total taxes roughly doubled — and nothing yet stops a rerun, under this administration or the next.
How do we prevent it from happening again?
The fix — two rules the council can pass right now
1. Truth in budgeting: if the money won't come back next year, it can't pay bills that will.
2. Open checkbook: every payment, every authority, every tax deal — published, searchable, updated monthly.
Steal these lines — every one is the government's own number:
“The city's own report admits it burned $667 million of one-time money on ongoing bills — and calls the hole structural.”
“$105 million of the $120M state ‘rescue’ is a loan we have to pay back.”
“Trenton cut our school aid by two-thirds — so school taxes quadrupled.”
That's the whole story. Everything below is the receipts.
Taxes up 77%. State aid flat.
Every dollar of budget growth since 2014 landed on local property taxpayers. Source: NJ DCA User-Friendly Budget (Jersey City = muni 0906). The 2026 point is an estimate — the city's revised 15% increase is projected to raise ~$60M.
Municipal tax levyState aid
This chart is the municipal levy only — the school side of the same bill grew even faster. See the other half of your bill.
The other half of your bill: schools
The chart above shows the city levy. The school levy on the same tax bill more than quadrupled over the same years — driven by a state law. Sources: NJ DOE State Aid Summaries · JCPS budget documents · Civic Parent · district funding charts for every NJ district: Education Law Center. This section was added after a policy analyst flagged the gap — corrections welcome.
What happened. In July 2018 the state enacted “S2” (P.L.2018, c.67), phasing out hold-harmless school aid over seven years. Jersey City's annual K–12 state aid fell from $410M (2017–18) to $130M (2025–26) — a $281M-a-year, 68% cut, and the 2025–26 cut was the largest dollar cut of any NJ district. School boards replaced the lost aid with local taxes: the school levy rose from $124M to $534M — 4.3× in seven years. That is the other engine of your tax bill.
Why the state cut. New Jersey's aid formula is wealth-equalized: aid covers the gap between what a district's budget should cost and its “local fair share” — which is indexed to property wealth and income. Jersey City's equalized property value grew from ~$34B (2018) to ~$49B (2023), so its expected local share soared. Meanwhile the city had long taxed itself lightly for schools: in 2018 the school levy was $124M against a $398M fair share, and the average JC school tax was $1,559 vs. $4,610 statewide (court record). The district sued over the cuts; in February 2025 the Appellate Division sided with the state (unpublished), finding the cuts tracked Jersey City's own under-taxation as its wealth grew.
The PILOT connection. This interacts with the tax abatements described below: under the long-term exemption law, PILOT payments historically split 95% city / 5% county / 0% schools, and abated value doesn't count in the ratable base — the State Comptroller warned in 2010 that this lets a city “hide its true wealth from the school district and the state.” By 2023, PILOT properties paid the city ~$103M while avoiding ~$256M in ordinary taxation. A 2018 companion law also let Jersey City levy a 1% employer payroll tax dedicated to schools (~$65–86M/yr since 2019).
What it did to bills. In 2022 alone the school levy rose $116M and the city levy $112M — the total levy jumped from $636M to $852M, and the bill on a $462K-assessed home rose $2,219 in one year, to $9,626. The school share of a JC tax dollar went from 24% (2018) to 42% (2022) — still below the NJ average of 53%. By 2025–26 the local levy funds over 60% of the schools budget, vs. 17% in 2018.
Read carefully: the school levy is a separate line on the same tax bill — don't add it to the 77% municipal chart above (a JC bill = municipal + school + county). Statewide, S2's seven-year phase-in ended in FY2025 with the formula fully funded for the first time. Two readings of this data are both fair: “the state cut Jersey City's schools” and “Jersey City under-taxed for schools for years while its wealth grew.” The figures support both — which is why every one links to its source.
The same six one-shots, every year
Non-recurring money spent on recurring costs — so the gap returns bigger. The city's own report itemizes it.
Year
What happened
Source
2013+
The start of the “emergency note” habit — the city has issued >$200M in emergency notes for operating costs since 2013.
The largest verified items sit off the operating budget — in footnotes, authorities, or future years. Each links to an official source.
What the budget leaves out. Two things the ~$774M budget the council votes on does not show on its face: (1) the city's authorities — water/sewer, redevelopment, housing — keep their own budgets and hundreds of millions in debt entirely off the municipal budget; and (2) the biggest obligations — a $1 billion retiree-health liability and $600M+ in pensions — appear only in the footnotes of an audit, never on the budget you adopt. [CY2020 audit, Notes 6–7]
Item
Amount
Say it
Source
Read carefully: do not add these figures together — several overlap, and debt/liabilities (stocks) are not the same as annual costs (flows). The retiree-health and pension figures are from the city's most recent full audit (CY2020) and may be out of date. Details and honesty guards: see the city's own Financial Emergency Report and the source linked in each row above.
The clearest example: borrowing from the water authority
Under a 2023 40-year franchise renewal, the Jersey City Municipal Utilities Authority paid City Hall $53.1 million in cash in FY2024 — nearly triple 2023 — and issued $35 million in new bonds to fund it. The city is financing day-to-day operations with the water authority's debt, which residents repay through scheduled 7%-then-5%/year water and sewer rate increases. Counting the authorities, roughly $673M in city-guaranteed debt and ~$189M/year in spending sit outside the budget the council votes on.
A large share of what Jersey City spends and owes sits OFF the budget you vote on.
The ~$774M municipal budget (2024, per the NJ DCA User-Friendly Budget) does not include these separate public entities — each with its own budget and its own debt:
Jersey City Board of Education — the school district's separate budget and its own school tax (on your tax bill, not the municipal budget).
Hudson County — county government and the county tax (on your bill, separate).
Jersey City Housing Authority — public housing, separately (federally) funded.
In fairness: the Incinerator Authority (JCIA) was dissolved in 2016 and parking is now a municipal division — both are inside today's municipal budget.
Where the money goes
A sample of the city's larger contracts and vendor payments (2020–2026). Every name and amount here was individually confirmed against its source resolution — not auto-parsed. Click any row to open the official document.
These are ordinary vendors the City pays for goods and services — their inclusion implies nothing improper about them. Amounts are the contract “not-to-exceed” or claim figure stated in the resolution; recurring contracts show the largest single award. This is a sample of larger payments, not a complete list.
Paid to
Amount
For
Type
Year(s)
Source
River North Transit, LLC
$7,451,210
on-demand bus services (contract extension/amendment) · recurring, 2 contracts
architectural services for the Community Recreational Center project (feasibility studies, conceptual design, community meetings, schematic master plan, cost estimate) · recurring, 2 contracts
Every off-budget, authority, PILOT, special-emergency, and deferred-charge resolution the city adopted, 2019–2026. Search, sort, and click each row through to the official source PDF.
Read before quoting: amounts are the stated figure on each authorizing resolution; many are refundings/rollovers of the same debt — do not sum them. Use this to see scale and to reach the official source document.
Year
Res #
Amount ▼
Category
Context
Source
Looking for who the city pays? This project does not publish a vendor list — auto-parsed names can be wrong, and we won't risk misattributing them. Go straight to the official record instead: each resolution above links to its source PDF (payee, amount, purpose), you can browse the city council resolution portal, or request the full vendor check register from the City via OPRA.
Rules that stop the cycle — most enactable by city ordinance now.
1. Structural-balance rule
One-time money can never fund recurring costs.
2. Rolling 4-year plan
Expose the out-year cliff a one-year patch hides.
3. Whole-city budget
One document that includes every authority's full budget & debt — water/sewer, redevelopment, housing — plus the pension and retiree-health holes, on one page. Nothing off-book.
4. Deferred-charge limits
Stop pushing foreseeable costs into future years.
5. Rainy-day floor
A minimum reserve that can't be raided to zero.
6. PILOT fair share
Mandatory school/county share; caps, sunsets, a public dashboard.
7. Open checkbook
Publish every transaction — vendor, amount, account, and purpose — in a public, searchable, downloadable format, updated monthly, so any resident can follow the money without filing a records request.
What you can do
The 2026 budget is being decided right now — presented July 13, introduced July 15, adopted in early August. This is the window to be heard.
Get the findings
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First, see what it means for you. Check your own bill on the city's 2026 Estimated Tax Calculator — then put your number in your comment. Your bill is more persuasive than any statistic.
1
Speak at the hearing
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Find or double-check your ward on the city's official map
The authoritative source, maintained by Jersey City. Find your block, then pick that ward above.
Five questions worth asking
Taxes are up 77% since 2014 while state aid stayed flat — what's the plan to stop filling every gap with property taxes?
The city's own report says we used ~$667M of one-time money in 2019–2025. What one-time revenue is in the 2026 budget, and what happens when it runs out?
$105M of the “$120M state package” is a loan — how and when do we repay it?
Will you support a rule that one-time money can't fund recurring costs?
Will you support publishing every city transaction in a public, searchable “open checkbook”?
Copy-paste message to the council
Dear Council Member{{REP}},
I am a Jersey City resident{{WARD}}. I'm concerned the city keeps closing budget gaps with one-time money. By the city's own Financial Emergency Report, we used about $667 million of it from 2019 to 2025, and $105 million of this year's $120 million state package is a loan, not aid.
I'm asking you to: (1) support a structural-balance rule so one-time money can't fund recurring costs; and (2) publish every city transaction in a public, searchable "open checkbook."
Where do you stand? Thank you.
[Your name]
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Your council: Denise Ridley (Ward A, President) · Joel Brooks (B) · Thomas Zuppa Jr. (C) · Jake Ephros (D) · Eleana Little (E) · Frank Gilmore (F) · at-large: Mamta Singh, Michael Griffin, Rolando Lavarro Jr.
Don't trust us — check the sources
Every figure is the city's or state's own number. Go straight to the primary documents.
How this was built, and every primary document behind it.
Trend and budget figures come from the NJ DCA User-Friendly Budget database (Jersey City = municipality 0906). The off-budget and emergency items were compiled from the City of Jersey City's own published council resolutions (2019–2026), each linked to its source PDF. The structural-deficit, one-shot, and deferred-charge figures are the city's own numbers from the documents below. Vendor/recipient names are intentionally not published (auto-parsed names can be inaccurate).
Some liability figures (retiree health, pensions) are measured as of the city's most recent full audit (CY2020) and may be out of date; the 2026 chart point is a labeled estimate. See the full disclaimer.