Sussex assessment process is flawed

Below is the substance of a letter submitted to the director of the Sussex County Assessment Office, contesting the assessment of our property.

The assessment was contested because:

• The assessment exceeded the price paid for the property and did not match any comparable sale or estimated value listed on any major online real estate appraisal site
• There is no way to determine how the property was assessed – an essential element of due process
• Sussex County delegated the assessment to a contractor; however, state law says that only the county has the authority to conduct an assessment (Delaware Code Title 9, Section 7004)
• The county has abdicated its responsibility to oversee the assessment process. According to the Cape Gazette of Dec. 2, the contractor will not share its assessment data with the county until February 2025 – three months from now – and, according to the Assessment Office’s interviews in October 2024 with other media, when the assessment process will already be complete
• By law, the board of assessments is required to oversee the assessment process. The county has failed to name any members of the board, however
• According to the Cape Gazette, the reassessment contractor is performing under a fixed-price contract. The contractor has been assigned the initial authority to hear appeals from assessments, but the contractor has a conflict of interest – an incentive to simply approve its own assessments
• On administrative appeals to the board of assessments, per the board’s rules, the contractor’s assessments – despite the constitutional and administrative defects noted above – will be entitled to a presumption of correctness
• Administrative appeals will be to board of assessments, which, according to its website, will meet for only the first 15 working days of March 2025. According to the Gazette, nearly 200,000 properties are being assessed. If even only a tiny percentage of the assessments are appealed, the board will hear thousands of appeals over 15 days – and so will need to summarily approve appraisals from the contractor
• Normal judicial review will be impossible. Courts normally defer to an agency’s factual findings; here, however, for the reasons outlined above, a court would be deferring to a contractor’s assessment, based on secret criteria, without any true oversight by the governmental unit responsible for the assessment, and on a record from a clearly defective administrative appeals process. 

Once the assessments are fixed, the next step will be the setting of a county-wide rate of taxation. In setting that rate, the county takes the position that individual parcels’ assessments can rise by any amount, so long as the county gross revenues do not increase annually by more than 10% (or 15% in the case of school tax). Many may argue, however, the law’s intent is not to cap government revenues but instead to protect property owners – many of whom are on fixed incomes, and who moved here because of Delaware’s reputation for low taxes – from property tax increases that could far, far exceed 10% to 15%.