Why Should Delaware Care?
Property taxes are the main source of money for Delaware’s city and county governments. But five years ago, a judge ruled the state’s system for determining those taxes was unconstitutional. How county’s fix that problem by reassessment every property in the state will have lasting impacts on the tax bills of every resident.
New Castle County expects thousands of its residents to formally appeal the results of the government’s first property reassessment in more than four decades – a yearslong endeavor that was set off in 2020 by a judge’s ruling in a lawsuit over school funding.
In preparation for the pushback, the New Castle County Council on Tuesday approved a $1.3 million expenditure to hire a team of what they call “referees” tasked with adjudicating the disputes.
New Castle County Executive Marcus Henry will sign the ordinance into law, according to his spokesman Kyle Grantham.
The ordinance states that county officials expect the owners of as many as 15,000 parcels to formally appeal their newly calculated land values. More than 200,000 individual pieces of land exist across the county in total.
How to appeal
To file a challenge, residents must submit a reassessment appeal form to New Castle County by March 14.
Those forms are scheduled to become available one month earlier on Feb. 14 on the county’s Board of Assessment Review website.
Property owners can return their appeals forms by mail, email, or electronically through an online portal, according to County Accounting and Fiscal Manager Denny Hardman.
The thousands of expected assessment disputes follow months of informal appeals that residents had sent to the county’s reassessment contracting company, Tyler Technologies, beginning last summer.
During Tuesday’s council meeting, Tyler Technologies reassessment manager Michael McFarlane said his company in recent months has held more than 11,000 hearings to evaluate the legitimacy of those informal appeals.
Most were filed by homeowners, he said, with only a few hundred sent by businesses. The company will make its final determinations on the county’s property values by Feb. 14, he said.
“We are still making value revisions to parcels,” McFarlane said Tuesday.
A legal settlement sparks review
The county’s reassessment project began in 2020 when a Delaware judge ruled that the state’s property taxes – which funds school, police, and other local governmental tasks – were based on land values that were so far off from the actual real estate market that they violated the state Constitution.
New Castle County had last assessed land values in 1983.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU and the NAACP, and later joined by the city of Wilmington, that claimed that Delaware’s property tax system sent too few dollars to schools in low-income areas.
As part of a legal settlement, New Castle County agreed in May 2020 to the arduous and politically thorny task of reassessing the values of all properties countywide.
The county subsequently hired Tyler Technologies and the company began inspecting properties in late 2021. Last summer, the company sent initial assessment notices to residents.
Throughout the process, county officials under then-Executive Matt Meyer had repeated that they aim to ensure that property taxes after the reassessment bring in the same amount of revenue countywide that they would have if the change not occurred.
Still, the reassessment will mean tax increases for certain individual parcels and decreases for others. The county has said roughly a third of residents would see increases, a third would see decreases and a third would see little to no change.
Delaware law prevents its counties from raising property taxes more than 15% in a given year.
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