Do You Want An Audit Of Tyler Technologies?
To me the answer is an obvious YES. Rep. Eric Morrison just shared the following:
Three NCC councilpersons have introduced a resolution calling for an audit of Tyler Technologies, how the company performed their property reassessment work, how the county instructed them to do so, and if the company followed those instructions.
The resolution will be voted on TOMORROW evening, August 26, at a NCC Council meeting.
ASAP, please email and/or call your councilperson and let them know you support this resolution. Also, please consider attending the meeting either in person at the Louis L. Redding City/County Building, 800 N. French Street, in Wilmington, or via Zoom here.
Please note that this audit would be carried out by the county auditor. The audit would not cost taxpayers anything.
To learn who your county councilperson is and/or how to contact them, click here. Or you can visit the NCC Parcel Search site here, locate your property, and your county council person is listed. Then, for contact information, look up your councilperson here.
Thank you to Councilpersons Dave Tackett, Brandon Toole, and Dee Durham for your leadership in this matter.
All my best,
Representative Eric Morrison, 27th District
302-744-4351
I’m calling my councilperson. Feel free to do the same.
Eric grandstanding!!
Surprise surprise
Eric has been by far one of the most effective legislators we’ve seen in recent years.
He’s passed several significant pieces of legislation that have required real skill to get across the finish line.
I didn’t know that County Council was considering this tomorrow night. I think Eric, who is not my State Rep, performed a public service in letting everybody know.
You’ve earned your monicker–‘Sad’. Own it.
I wonder if “Sad” is the same person who went off on my Facebook a few hours ago claiming that the supporters of the resolution are “grandstanding?” I also got accused of being an “activist” by this person.
Being called an ‘activist’ is nothing to be ashamed of.
the audit needs to be done to explain same houses in the same neighborhood with wildly varying assessments. 2 houses next door to each other with the same footprint but $400 different assessment?
Home improvements count toward the value of a home. My initial assessment had me down for a full basement, when I have half-basement, half-crawlspace. There are other homes in my development with my footprint that have full basements. And if you finish the basement, that increases the value as well.
Henry George’s philosophy did not prevail. Improvements to your property are taxable.
When you say $400 difference you mean in tax bill, correct? So either 30 bucks a month to the mortgage company to cover escrow, or $400 more on a home owned free and clear that’s worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ok.
All the assessors ought to be working off the same general evaluation rubric, which should be available to every homeowner. there is no reason that I cannot go look up my property information and see what factors were weighted to evaluate my property versus an identical home. This veil of “proprietary” makes it all look like a WAG (wild ass guess).
Do agree with this. We can’t assess public tax based on a secret formula. That needs to be handled.
But listening to people whinge over a few hundred bucks after paying nearly nothing for four decades is a little rich, I think.
Here’s the kicker to what you point out: If your tax bill went up by a lot, that means you’ve been getting away with paying less than you should have for many, many years.
Exactly. We’re all long term Delawareans. Personally, I’m a lifer. Everyone knows the score. You’re literally just telling on yourself.
Did you get a notice from Tyler during the process? Did you send it back with any modifications?
You could always compare figures with your neighbors in identical homes. But of course they aren’t actually identical. Even when they’re built they usually have different add-ons, depending on what the owners ordered, and that multiplies over the years.
Exact square footage of both the house and the plot can be different. As I noted above, if you improve your basement that increases the value of the home and therefore your property tax. This is why you have to get a permit for any home renovations, right down to replacing your water heater.
This mass tantrum is due in part to people not paying attention until the bills came due.
Certainly seems like something that the County Auditor would already have planned or the authority to do. Is the resolution more so that the report is especially public?
Yesterday Kim Williams lazily shared a MAGA loudmouth’s post. Eric’s call-to-arms is much better and less prejudicial.
The unraveling is underway – she is not doing well. I know there is a shortlist of seats that WFP is looking to claim in the next cycle but I think they need to get a candidate locked in and talking to the 19th district now. She represents a lot of entrenched interests that are ready to backfill her seat the moment she taps out so the sooner the better.
I’m all here for a Kim Williams primary. Yes her sharing and liking a MAGA conspiracy theory page was quite the laugher.
Honestly tho, even with Eric, considering how little Dover ever did to address this issue, maybe they should just sit and be quiet a little on this.
It’s not a Dover issue.
Oh didn’t know Dover doesn’t control school funding. Silly me. I’m happy they took a whole 6 hours out of their summer to address it.
The school funding they control is per student, with various supplements based on those students. It has nothing to do with property taxes.
They spent six hours addressing it because of people who don’t know what they’re talking about whinging to them.
Where did she post it? Her personal Facebook
Her State Rep official page.
Whoa…
You knew this was coming back when she went gun nut.
Received annual property tax bill at a significantly lower amount due than last year. No complaints.
In theory one-third will go up, one-third will go down and one-third will stay the same. Because of the school district add-ons – many of them couldn’t resist the opportunity to get more money without a referendum – a lot more bills went up than down.
And the fact that your bill went down means you’ve been overpaying for years.
As someone who has lived in Delaware for only 20 years after living in other states I have never felt like I was overpaying compared to my prior residences.
And no sales tax, either.
I take it as proof that you can never cut taxes enough to keep people from complaining about them, so raise taxes on the rich.
Supposedly if we do that rich people will leave the state, which is a joke – that sort has already done that. They domicile in Florida for six months plus one day (a lot of that state’s population influx is tax dodgers who live there half the year, wink wink) and another half-percent or whatever isn’t going to make any difference.
People think that I am kidding when I state that I would like to pay more income tax than anyone because that would mean that my earned income would exceed everyone else’s.
I forget the exact words used by the late Al Neuharth, the Gannett CEO and founder of USA Today, but what you’ve written echoes what he said in a column about paying his federal taxes. In essence, “If I’m paying more in taxes, that means I’ve had a very good year.”
Couple of items to consider (well, more than a couple):
1. Yes, we need an audit. We need to better understand the criteria Tyler used in assigning values for residential properties and why there was such a significant overall change between residential and commercial valuations.
2. In the context of oversight, I still believe this is a state issue. All three counties will be assessing on a similar schedule and, hopefully, with uniform standards. Better to have the state setting standards going forward than to have each county acting on its own.
3. What’s going to happen next? Where’s the common sense, or consistency, in allowing cities and counties to set separate residential and commercial rates, but only allowing school districts in New Castle County to do so? And what will those commercial property owners do before next year’s tax bills are issued? They can’t say their holdings were overvalued, but they could try to litigate whether it’s proper for them to be taxed at up to double the rate of residential properties (especially for school taxes because corporations don’t have children). Consider the consequences in this presumably “business friendly” state, and our judges’ likely interest in preserving the state’s “corporate capital” brand. I’d venture a guess that the Chamber of Commerce types are already considering litigation options and, should they prevail, we’ll be looking at another uproar like the current one, most likely in 2027.
Something tells me that the pols, the judges and the school boards are going to be playing whack-a-mole with this one for many years to come.
To your second point, I think this could run into home-rule issues, in that you’d have the state taking over the funding mechanism for the counties. I hope one of our legal-profession readers can help out on that.
What the state could do is unify the schools into one state-wide district and set the school tax rate itself on a statewide basis, since, as Sad noted, the state already shoulders the bulk of the burden.
Alby was spot on 100% with his comments.
Alby was spot on with 100% of his comments. Ty for trying to explain
There was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer a few days ago about the sale of a commercial building in the city.
Got that? It’s worth 25% of what it was worth 20 years ago. Now multiply that by every commercial property out there.
Amazon took over a site that had been vacant for years, so they didn’t pay much for it. It doesn’t matter what the corporation is worth. It’s called property tax because it’s based on what the property is worth.
This is a much bigger problem for the city than it is for any of Delaware’s counties, because a bigger portion of the city’s tax base is commercial. It’s a problem for cities across the country, and it’s a major reason everybody was forced back to work – if all the business districts die simultaneously, so do the cities.
Reminder: NCC Meeting starting at 6:30 tonight.
The Zoom link is up top in the body of the article.
First fireworks of the night. A proposed resolution by Dave Tackett has been derided by several councilmembers as being mere politics. Council members Carter and Street have taken that position.
Man, Monique Johns is really incapable of running a meeting. She’s terminally flustered. Never quite sure when it’s time for a roll call, or what should come next. To her credit, she is not an ‘iron fist’ type of ruler.
Couple of other observations: Jea Street enjoys playing the part of grumpy old man as he fires potshots remotely.
Kevin Caneco clearly seems like he’s planning to run for another office. Pretty transparent political speech tonight. In the ‘I’m not like these other guys’ mode.
Now it’s degenerated to NCC vs. Wilmington and ‘why aren’t they doing their own assessment?’
Whatever eventuates with this resolution, it’s been an evening of all heat and no light.
The entire debate centers on whether or not the resolution is necessary because the County Auditor is already conducting an audit of Tyler’s methods.
Not the most substantive of debates, IMO.
ANNNDDD-The resolution is defeated. 6 Yes, 7 No.
Gotta say, since all the resolution did was to codify what was already happening, a no vote was basically a fuck-you to pretty much everybody who spoke tonight.
Those who voted no own their votes. Yes, I think it will result in challenges to them. I THINK the 6 Yes votes were Tackett, Toole, Durham, Cartier, Johns, and, um, one more. Sorry, gonna have to dock myself half of my pay this week…
It sounds as if the whole thing was just grandstanding if the audit is happening regardless.
Which brings up the question, who are the 7 no votes trying to impress? The yes votes are playing to the public; who are the no votes playing to, considering that the audit is happening despite their votes?
It was almost like a grievance session. ‘Why are we being picked on when everybody else should be picked on too?”
I’m glad I watched the session. Even with some new members, there are some folks on Council who are well past their sell-by date.
And Monique Johns has not a clue about how to run a public meeting. There was a resolution–Falun Gong?–where they voted on it but she was unaware that they had voted on it. Disfunction ensued. Attorneys were called in. Was the vote a vote or a vote that was a prelude to a vote. Snorts of derision filled the chamber.
Here are the yays and nays, from WDEL:
Councilmembers David Carter, Valerie George, Penrose Hollins, Janet Kilpatrick, Tim Sheldon, George Smiley, and Jea Street voted against the review, with Kevin Caneco, John Cartier, Dee Durham, David Tackett, Brandon Toole, and President Monique Williams Johns in support.