The Red Clay School Board approved a tax split for residential and non-residential properties at its Wednesday meeting to offer some reassessment relief.
Property reassessment values led many residents to see substantial increases in property taxes this year.
Like other New Castle County districts, Red Clay residents took on more of the tax burden than non-residential property owners following the reassessment. In Red Clay, residents’ burden jumped 8.7%.
Board member Kecia Nesmith said she can only imagine how devastating some of the increases felt.
“And that's why there's all these processes and legislators are coming together,” Nesmith said. “So our goal tonight is to take away some of the burden on residential taxpayers by switching it, and instead of residential taxpayers paying more than non-residential taxpayers, we're trying to level the burden a little bit.”
School districts are also allowed to increase the tax rate up to 10% in reassessment years. Red Clay’s board agreed to drop the 1% tax rate increase approved last month.
“Since July, the federal government has very abruptly done an about face and released those funds,” Red Clay’s chief operations officer and assistant superintendent Ted Amman said. “So we have those funds. We did not lose the funds that we were being told that we would lose. So we have removed that 1% [hike].”
The newly approved tax rates shift about $16.4 million back to non-residential properties. That returns the resident and non-residential burdens back to pre-reassessment levels.
But Red Clay superintendent Dorrell Green conceded these are stop gap solutions.
“Because of the shift and the burden that's been placed on residential, there's obviously still work to be done to really look at what we've heard from the community, just in terms of how the reassessment process actually worked,” Green said. “Because there are still similar properties that have different values. But again, that's not within the board's purview.”
Green added the district must be mindful of increasing the burden on non-residential parcels because it can’t differentiate between larger operations and small businesses.
Amman said district officials have to make sure to bring in the same amount of revenue as anticipated before the rate splitting.
“It limits the increase to two times, meaning the commercial rate or the non-residential rate can't be more than two times the residential rate,” Ammann told board members. “We are not recommending to you tonight that you take that maximum two times rate.”
Green said it’s important residential taxpayers feel some relief. Every residential property will see a 12% decrease from their initial 2025 bill, but many will still likely be higher than pre-assessment numbers.
The district’s role is to educate children, but staff operate beyond those roles as well, Green said.
“We're talking about the livelihood for individuals within our community who no longer have children in our school,” Green said. “So reducing and splitting this rate this evening is our attempt to continue to work through this process to provide relief and create balance where it was prior to the reassessment process.”
Board member Jose Matthews concurred, saying the Board came to this decision after several district officials attended the special session in Dover last week.
“I would be remiss if I did not vote without saying, shame on Tyler Technologies for the position in which we find ourselves in today,” Matthews said. “And I'm not looking for any acknowledgement or anything like that. I know that a lot of it's been said, but unfortunately, we are where we are today – in a very unfortunate situation – because of the broken trust that New Castle County Council and the executive from the prior administrations have done and their oversight of [Tyler Technologies].”
Matthews added that he feels commercial properties and large corporations aren’t paying their fair share of taxes.
Matthews thanked State Rep. Kim Williams (D-Stanton) who filed the bill that gave districts the power to split rates this year and has since filed another bill to split the rate in perpetuity. That will be heard in the upcoming legislative session.
