By Mediawatch:
Like you, I’m still trying to figure out who should be in the crosshairs.
A couple of things going on here:
1. There was minimal uproar last year in Kent because it’s the smallest county. There has been relatively little outrage in Sussex because property taxes are so damn low and there’s a smaller percentage of commercial sites there. So everything gets magnified in New Castle County.
2. There was little public reporting prior to the setting of the tax rates of the disparities between residential and commercial assessments. Yeah, I realize that there was some early grousing from folks thinking their homes were overvalued by Tyler, but I think most people assumed the increased valuations for residential and commercial would be pretty much the same. In other words, if our taxes were going up, we expected residential and commercial to be screwed equally.
3. For those reasons, many were shocked when residential valuations increased by significantly more than commercial, and then we wondered why the county and Wilmington set separate rates for commercial and residential but the school districts (which account for more than three-quarters of the tax bills) did not.
So, now we’ve got to look at solutions, and it’s good that the General Assembly is planning to come back in special session. Some thoughts:
1. The General Assembly has to give school districts the same authority as cities and counties to set separate tax rates for residential and commercial.
2. Tyler’s methodology has to be corrected to eliminate an obvious commercial vs. residential imbalance. You have to use the same effective date for both categories. You can’t base commercial values on a time frame when many businesses were closed or limited because of COVID while using the post-COVID July 2024 date for residential values.
3. We need legislation that spells out the criteria for performing the assessments. Also, given that these assessments will be performed regularly in the future, and that most property tax revenue goes to schools, the state should pay for future assessments and oversee how they are conducted so there is consistency among the counties.
4. The law permitting 10 percent collection increases post assessment should be eliminated because residents will feel they are being gouged every five years. However, we cannot let our schools starve. Let’s change the laws governing tax rates and referendumsl to let school districts increase their rates by 2 percent per year (Sorry, seniors — and I’m one of you — but that’s less than the typical Social Security COLA so it’s something we should be able to budget for.) If schools need more than a 2 percent hike, they should be able to say why and take it to the voters for approval.
5. The counties have to be more transparent about assessment appeals for commercial properties. If Amazon, or Chase, or DuPont, or Buccini/Pollin, or Christiana Mall wants its assessment lowered, that request should be publicly advertised, and experts other than those hired by the companies should have a say at any appeals hearing.
6. Districts that bumped up their rates to compensate for the federal bucks they thought they would lose but now will receive should set aside any additional funds collected in a separate account, make a public report on it next spring and offset their rates for 2026-27 by that amount.
I’ve been thinking about this for days, but that’s all I’ve got in the half-hour I’ve spent writing.
Hats off to Christian Willauer in Wilmington, Kim Williams in the GA and Kevin Caneco in the county for jumping on this issue. They all have good ideas.
I’m sure that the good folks who read this blog will have some more ideas that we all will be welcome to read about.
But, PU-LEEZE, quit bitching and start proposing solutions.