Sooner or later, any extensive discussion of school finance reform in Delaware will get around to a subject that seems to be the third rail of state politics: reassessing real estate property values statewide.
It has been a long time since the last reassessments were completed —1986 in Kent County, 1984 in New Castle County, and 1974 in Sussex County—and there have been significant changes in property usage since then. For example, “you’ve got properties in Kent County that are valued from when they were still farms, and they’re now booming developments, though not quite as booming as they were three or four years ago,” said reform advocate Paul A. Herdman, president and CEO of the Rodel Foundation of Delaware and a member of the Vision 2015 Implementation Team.
Karen Thorpe, business manager in the Colonial School District, and Marvin N. “Skip” Schoenhals, chairman of the Vision 2015 Implementation Team, use the same anecdote about an unidentified state legislator to explain why talk of reassessment never gets very far.
Here’s what Schoenhals says the lawmaker said: “Reassessment should be done. It’s the fair thing to do. But if I propose it, I’d get voted out of office. Therefore, I’m not even going to talk about it.”
Rep. Debra Heffernan, D-Brandywine Hundred, is only in her first term in the General Assembly, but she has evidently heard the same story. Asked for her view of reassessment as a component of school finance reform, she said, “I’m not going to talk about it.”
According to Thorpe, many school boards have made reassessment a legislative priority, and so have other groups of education officials. “It’s definitely something we’re talking about,” she said.
Even if Heffernan and other legislators won’t talk about it on the record, they view reassessment as a hot-button issue because it triggers a fear of the unknown.
Although state law limits the amount of additional tax revenue that school districts and county governments can collect after a reassessment, and although, in Schoenhals’ words, “one third of the property valuations should go up, one third should go down and one third should remain the same,” there is a general fear among taxpayers that the property they own will be among those whose assessed value will rise — and trigger higher tax bills in the following year. And the anonymous legislator that Schoenhals and Thorpe quote fears that if his constituents were to see their tax bills rise after a reassessment, they might take it out on him in the next election cycle.
The other issue in a reassessment is who pays for it.
“People keep mentioning that it’s fairly expensive to reappraise, and the only place that money’s going to come from is the state,” Schoenhals said. “But the state would get nothing out of reassessment because all property tax revenue would go to local governments, so [state officials] would have to question why we should use state dollars.”
The position of the Sussex County government suggests a willingness to consider reassessment, provided someone else picks up most of the tab. “Because local school districts stand to benefit the most from any reassessment – 85 percent of local tax revenue collected by the counties goes not to the counties, but to local schools – we believe the schools, and by extension the State, have a vested interest and a responsibility to share in that cost,” said Chip Guy, county public information officer.
Joanne Christian, president of the Appoquinimink Board of Education, said that local governments in some other states handle reassessments on a smaller scale, without doing an entire county, let alone an entire state, at one time. She thinks Delaware officials should consider a reassessment system that puts new values on properties whenever there is new construction or a renovation, or when the property changes hands.
