Key Takeaways
- The first completed property reassessment in each of Delaware’s three counties in decades has generated considerable confusion and frustration among taxpayers, as well as the various levels of government impacted by the county reassessment process.
- Our union believes there are prudent steps the Legislature can take to help Delaware families and provide clarity around this core function that our county governments have neglected here in the First State for generations.
- DSEA is urging lawmakers to reject other legislative proposals that would have disastrous, long-term consequences for the same Delaware public schools harmed by the counties’ failure to conduct regular reassessments.
Members of the Delaware General Assembly,
On behalf of the 14,000 public school educators represented by the Delaware State Education Association, we commend House Speaker Melissa Minor Brown and Senate President Pro Tempore David Sokola for calling the Delaware General Assembly into special session on August 12 to consider targeted measures related to reassessment.
The first completed property reassessment in each of Delaware’s three counties in decades has generated considerable confusion and frustration among taxpayers, as well as the various levels of government impacted by the county reassessment process.
Our union believes there are prudent steps the Legislature can take to help Delaware families and provide clarity around this core function that our county governments have neglected here in the First State for generations.
However, other legislative proposals were introduced on Thursday that – if implemented – would have disastrous, long-term consequences for the same Delaware public schools harmed by the counties’ failure to conduct regular reassessments.
Our state has made significant progress to rectify this decades-long injustice since the Court of Chancery’s 2020 ruling that found all three county governments in violation of the Delaware Constitution and led to the first property reassessments in nearly 40 years or more.
Now that the first tax bills from those reassessments have reached property owners in New Castle, Kent and Sussex counties, serious questions are being raised for the first time about whether Tyler Technologies – the firm hired by all three counties – was adequately equipped to conduct what essentially became a complete reassessment of every parcel of property in the State of Delaware.
Even as questions remain about Tyler Technologies’s methodology, it has become clear in recent weeks that those calculations significantly shifted the overall tax burden from commercial to residential properties, particularly in New Castle County.
While county governments were able to partially offset that shift by setting different tax rates for commercial and residential properties, no school district in Delaware was permitted to make a similar adjustment. As a result, residential property owners are now shouldering a disproportionate share of their district’s school taxes.
For that reason, our union strongly endorses the Delaware General Assembly’s proposal to rectify the tax burden imbalance by providing school districts with the same tool used by county governments to set separate tax rates for commercial and residential property.
DSEA also strongly supports the Delaware General Assembly’s plan to mitigate the harshest impacts of the first reassessment in decades on residential property owners. That includes allowing eligible residents to enter into payment plans for school taxes with no penalty or interest; lowering New Castle County’s late payment fees; and allowing county residents who successfully appeal their property values to receive direct cash refunds for overpayment.
Finally, while Delaware’s public school districts have been harmed by decades of county government inaction, some lawmakers are using this opportunity to place the blame on our under-funded public school system – largely because several districts used a tool granted to them by a near-unanimous, bipartisan vote of the Delaware General Assembly.
That law, enacted in 1972, allows school boards to approve a revenue increase of up to 10% following a reassessment, a tool long denied Delaware public school districts by the county’s failure to conduct routine reassessments.
As a direct result, school districts have had to rely entirely on Delaware’s referendum system – the most restrictive, local-revenue raising process in the nation – to mitigate the county’s failure to comply with their legal obligations. That unbalanced approach is exactly what the Delaware General Assembly specifically sought to prevent more than 50 years ago.
In fact, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster in his 2020 ruling specifically cited the 10% post-reassessment revenue enhancements as a critical tool that districts could – and should – be using to overcome decades of chronic underfunding caused by the failure of Delaware’s three counties.
For that reason, our union strongly encourages the Legislature to reject any proposal that would strip Delaware school districts of the ability to recover the education funding that has been lost to decades of complacency and malfunction.
The loss of that post-reassessment revenue tool has worsened the inequities built into our current education funding formula and ultimately denied an adequate education to generations of our most vulnerable students. Removing it entirely would only serve to make those inequities a permanent feature of Delaware’s education funding formula.
And yet, that’s exactly what House Bill 245 and House Bill 246 propose to do by restricting the ability of school boards to deliver the post-reassessment revenue enhancements promised to them by the State of Delaware’s Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches.
Worse still, those proposals seek to retroactively deny school districts the funding they have already budgeted for the upcoming school year. Retroactively eliminating the 10% funding enhancement will cause immediate harm to Delaware students, resulting in immediate job cuts, devastating program cuts to sports and arts programs, and cuts to planned improvements to school technology programs and curricula updates.
Rather than making sweeping changes to how our public schools are funded during a one-day special session, we strongly encourage the General Assembly to direct any proposed reforms of the mechanics used to generate local education funding to the Public Education Funding Commission – a task force specifically created by the Legislature to develop a roadmap for improving Delaware’s public education funding system.
After decades of systemic failure and kneejerk interventions that fell short of producing the desired results, it should be exceptionally clear to all lawmakers that holistically examining Delaware’s complex education funding formula and its many levers, calculations and intricate operations in their entirety is the only means by which we can hope to develop sufficient reforms that balance the financial interests of individual property owners with the overwhelming need to fairly and equitably educate 125,000 Delaware public school students.
Sincerely,
Stephanie Ingram President
Delaware State Education Association
