Smyrna Town Council again holds off on a decision about using property assessment data from Kent and New Castle Counties to formulate its local property tax bills.
The issue has been in front of council members twice in recent weeks, but officials have continued to kick the can down the road. At a public hearing on Monday, the town’s Finance Director, Kathleen Acevedo, rehashed many of the points she made at a meeting in early October and another two weeks later.
Among those points: the town is long overdue for an assessment, she says.
“Our current assessments are from 2006,” she told council members. “They are based off 2003 and 2004 and 2005 house values.”
Town Solicitor D. Barrett Edwards suggested that those outdated assessment values could put the town at legal risk, reminding them that the most recent assessments on the county level were sparked by a lawsuit.
“It would appear that we have a very similar issue that the counties had, which caused them to be threatened with a lawsuit,” he said. “So it certainly has a potential for us to be threatened with a lawsuit also, if we have the same exact deficiency.”
He added, however, that the counties’ assessments were substantially older than Smyrna’s.
Acevedo also noted that the town could do its own reassessment, but that would come at a cost of some $500,000. By contrast, she said, using county assessment data would cost the town about $15 per file per year.
One apparent sticking point for council members in recent weeks has been the effect on residents’ property tax bills. The town is required to calculate and publicize a revenue-neutral tax rate when they update assessments, although they are not required to stick to that rate. That revenue-neutral rate lowers the tax rate to offset the rise in property value assessments, but it does not mean that everyone’s property taxes will stay flat, Acevedo said.
“Some will go up, some will stay the same or about the same, and some will go down,” she explained. “It all depends on how your old value is, compared to your new value.”
But, Barrett added, those shifts in tax rates are part of an equalization process to make sure everyone pays their fair share.
“If someone out here sees your tax bill go up a little bit, then one way to look at this is you've been making out like a bandit for 20 years, and now we're correcting it,” he said. “If someone sees their tax rate go down, then it means you've been kind of subsidizing everybody else for the last 20 years or whatever, and now it's being corrected.”
But, public comments at the hearing may have given council members pause. Several residents spoke, airing an array of complaints about rising tax bills and town spending, as well as accusations that officials were trying to keep a potential adoption of county valuations under the radar.
At their business meeting following the public hearing, council members voted unanimously and with no discussion to postpone a vote. Officials must make a decision before February 1, although town staff have said an earlier decision will make the process of drafting the town’s budget simpler.
