Lewes will hold a public hearing to get input from taxpayers on whether the city should use Sussex County valuations for the city’s local property taxes.
City Council and the city’s Finance Committee have both discussed the issue several times in recent weeks, with Finance Committee members making the case that the city should take advantage of Sussex County’s offer to share its property valuations with cities and towns at no cost.
Finance committee members and some council members have been generally supportive of the idea, noting that it could save the city hundreds of thousands of dollars over doing its own assessments. It would also transfer the burden of managing appeals from the city to the county.
The data comes with one very important condition, explained Finance Committee Chair Tina Samson.
“The requirement for this is that it would be revenue neutral to us, which means basically if all the properties were to double, the tax rate would be half, so the city gets the same amount of money,” Samson told city council. “Now there is a variation in how it's going to affect various homeowners.”
Councilman Joseph Elder, an ex-officio member of the finance committee, says the committee wants to make sure property owners have a sense of how using county property valuations would affect them.
“The finance committee really wants to make sure that when we get this data out there that residents can come up and find out what the impact would be to them, so this won't just be throwing a bunch of data out,” Elder said.
Samson said finance committee members are looking at the idea of having a workshop before the public hearing.
“It will be much more to answer the question, why are we doing this and what's it going to cost me?” Samson explained.
Lewes Mayor Amy Marasco said she thinks a workshop before the more formal public hearing is a good idea.
“It translates it to reality for folks, and then we can do the hearing,” she said.
The public hearing will likely be on November 2 at 5:30 pm, with the workshop starting at 4:30.
