Editor-in-Chief Jacob Owens visits the “Beyond the Headlines” podcast to talk about a months-long project looking at the results of Delaware’s first reassessment of property values in more than 40 years. Working with Tech Impact, Spotlight produced an interactive map showing how the state’s tax burdens and property assessments have shifted in that time. 

In his accompanying reporting, Jake highlights questions around the outcome of the reassessment prompted by the data map, including whether the reassessment will help Delaware achieve educational equity.

The podcast was hosted by Director of Community Engagement David Stradley.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

We tend to only get on this podcast with you when you are engaged in massive, months-long projects. 

Yes, that seems to be my forte these days.

For this is a super-complicated project that you and the team have taken on, we are going to start with what we normally call our “Hey mom” question. But your mom doesn’t live in Delaware. 

Not anymore. They retired and moved to warmer climates. 

So we’re going to do the “Hey, mother-in-law question.” I’d like you to imagine that you’re talking to your mother-in-law, who I’m guessing doesn’t know a ton about this issue, and just tell her briefly about this data mapping project and the reporting that came out of it. 

Ironically enough, my mother-in-law and my mother have the same name, so that makes it even easier.

So. Hey Linda, we did this big data project that really looked to kind of check Tyler Technologies’ homework and find out whether the property assessment data matched what we expected to see, and it brought some pretty interesting results. 

Let’s go back to the beginning here. Where did the idea for this project come from, and why did you have to partner with somebody on the outside to do it?

So it really got started out of a little bit of frustration. We’d seen so much hand wringing and conversation and debate over, “Did we get this right? Did we get it wrong? What should we have expected? What didn’t we get?” 

I was looking to the state or maybe even the counties to release this sort of project that basically would help the public really understand what happened with the assessments and the data. We just weren’t seeing it, and from what I heard, they weren’t going to do it. 

Then I checked on the legal settlement and the legal settlement didn’t require any kind of after action report to be done. So I really started talking with the team and said, “Do you think we could do this? Is this something that is in our wheelhouse?”

And, you know, we quickly decided that some of it was, and some of it probably wasn’t. 

Data collection is something we have done on the regular. So we knew we could probably get the raw numbers. But what we did with them then to make them of any kind of use to the public was something that I really hadn’t had much experience with. But I remembered talking with a friend of mine, Ryan Harrington at Tech Impact’s Data Lab. 

This was an initiative started up back during COVID to help New Castle County and the state really dig through a lot of data that was coming out on the spread of COVID and try to predict the hotspots. One of their more interesting projects was using fecal matter. Apparently the COVID strain lived in the fecal matter, and so they were tracking sewer results around the county. 

And so I thought to myself, if they could do that, they could probably do this.

Because that was one form of a fecal show. The property reassessment is another form of a fecal show.

It was definitely a form of a fecal show. So I had a chat with Ryan. He was very interested.

We started meeting. They pulled a team together, we pulled a team together and we got underway. 

The lawsuit that you mentioned in passing – that was a lawsuit about a variety of educational issues. But one thing it mandated was this assessment. 

It was a group of plaintiffs, really led by the NAACP. I think it was the Delawareans for Educational Opportunity – DEO II believe was the acronym. It was a couple different groups, but CLASI (the Community Legal Aid Society) and the ACLU were involved to help litigate it.

Ultimately the Delaware’s Chancery Court came down and ruled that the way that we were doing reassessments was unconstitutional because we weren’t establishing fair market value.

They [DEO] asked for a couple different things to try to increase funding for schools, but they also were looking to create a more equitable funding model for the state. And so that was part of why we couldn’t continue to kind of make up fake values for what a property might’ve been worth decades ago. We needed to start using actual valuations. 

If a listener has not been on the website or looked to the newsletter, what’s the product that came out of this work? What all is there for people to look at?

You’re going to find a couple things. 

First and foremost, you’re going to find the map. It’s a heat map that Tech Impact’s Data Lab, a team of data engineers and mapping designers, built for us. It has some tutorial futures that take you around the screen and give you an understanding. 

But this is not a map where you zoom in and say, “my house went up this much.” This is really meant to look at communities against communities. So Tech Impact made some choices along the way and that included using census precinct level data, which is something you probably aren’t that used to seeing. 

We did not use zip codes, which you may be more familiar with. ZIP codes, unfortunately, are usually fairly large in some areas and can include wildly different types of housing and communities. So we used essentially the smallest designation we could find that still made sense and mapped it out. 

You’ll also find an explainer story about what this map is, why we did it, how to navigate it, and probably most importantly what it isn’t. 

And then finally, you’ll see reporting that really dives into why it matters and why officials think that the takeaways are what they are. 

On the map you can filter it in three ways, per census precinct level. What are those three things people can find on it? 

The most important one, I think, is assessment change. This one basically shows you a collection of the properties within the census precinct, their total value between 2024 and 2025. So that shows you basically the pre-assessment and reassessment total value and the percentage change between those. 

And the important thing to note with this is: everything went up. This was a reassessment. Nothing goes down. So everything is judged against the median value. So if it went up compared to the median, or the middle most value, you’re going to see reds. If it went below that median value, you’re going to see blues. 

Second, you’re going to see tax change. This is an accumulation of all the taxes paid by the parcels in that precinct, judged against the median. 

And then finally tax burden, which is essentially a calculation of your tax over your assessment. So, how much tax are you paying compared to the value of your home? 

Before we get into some of the findings, let’s talk a little bit more about process. Can you talk us through the process of getting the raw data and then the work with Tech Impact to create the maps?

It was interesting because one of the things we’ve come to understand is that every county is different and they do things their own way. We quickly came to understand that while we thought maybe it would take a week or two or three to get all the data, it ended up taking us almost three months to really get everything we needed to make the maps.

Sussex County gave it to us as a Google Sheet. New Castle County gave it to us as an Excel sheet, but only through certain file protocols because it was too large of a file to just drop into Google.

And then Kent County, God bless them, I don’t know what file format they used, but even Tech Impact said they had never seen it before. So there was a little bit of a learning curve to compute whatever it is Kent County is doing into something readable in their formats. 

So if we’re shouting out counties, we’re shouting out Sussex County.

Sussex – God bless you.

And then your helper at New Castle County.

Yes. Uh, Robert at the data assessment data office in New Castle County. I had to go through him setting up a file transfer protocol three times to finally get the gigabytes of data. So thank you for your steadfast efforts, Robert. 

I remember when you brought this idea up in one of our leadership meetings, you were very honest saying, “You know, I don’t know what this data will show. We might do a whole bunch of work on this. And it’s not really a story.” 

As you started working through the data, what were some of the things that caught your eye and made you think, okay, there’s something here?

There were a couple moments early on. We got Sussex County’s data right away, and so we actually mapped Sussex County first, and there weren’t any real surprises.

The assessments really moved where we thought it should in terms of along the beaches. Western Sussex saw smaller changes compared to the median. 

When you say it moved as you thought it would move. Does that mean the houses that you expected would be worth more, were worth more?

That’s right. And not only just worth more, but the increase between years would’ve been the highest out of anywhere in the county. That’s where you would expect to see your deep reds. And we did. Places like Rehoboth and Dewey were your hotspots and then places like Harrington and Bridgeville out the other way were lower.

The other thing that we saw was in Kent County. Same kind of thing. The suburbs of Dover where we’ve had some housing growth like Cheswold and Magnolia, and even the beach communities like Bowers Beach and Kitts Hummock and some of these areas, we saw property valuations rise. Areas like the older parts of Dover didn’t, at least as much.

Those were all expected. 

So you got through Kent and Sussex and you’re like, this may not be a story. This may have worked.

In some ways if the reassessment worked, I think that’s a story, but maybe just not one that most readers would come to expect. 

And then we really saw New Castle County, which in my mind really raised some questions because that trend of really seeing the reds where we would see housing growth in recent decades wasn’t what we were seeing. We were actually seeing blues in areas like Middletown, Odessa Townsend, Greenville, Centerville, Hockessin. And then when we looked at downtown, historic, hundred year old communities in Wilmington, we saw really deep reds where places like Hilltop and East Side and Riverside and Southbridge had percentage increases higher than anywhere in the county 800% or 1000% increases. 

Again, for our color-minded friends, if you’re looking on the map, blues are less higher increases, reds are higher increases. 

Yes, higher than the median. 

So that made you realize, okay, something did not work the way it was supposed to work here. 

In some ways it did because one of the things when I’d been talking to the lawyers who had filed the original lawsuit was this belief that lower income families had been subsidizing the property tax bills of higher income families because the value of their homes hadn’t changed since 1983. And obviously the housing market has boomed since then. 

So you would expect that if your house is worth a million dollars in Greenville, that you’d be paying a disproportionately high part of your income in your taxes. And what we didn’t really see was that reflected in the data. We actually saw higher comparative changes for these families that the advocates were basically out to serve.

At a super high level, once all the data was processed and the maps were created, what are the main takeaways for a layperson in Delaware? For your mother-in-law? 

Everybody’s going to have a different feeling with this because anytime I try to talk to anybody around the state about this, they will reflect on their own bill. That’s a totally normal way to think about this. 

The one thing that I would say is this was a zero sum process. Which meant that if it truly was going to be revenue neutral and the valuations change, then that means somebody pays more and somebody pays less.

I think the expectation was that communities like Hilltop would pay less than what they ended up paying, and yet we see wide swaths of a really struggling, lower income community paying significantly more in their tax bills. And then in areas that have higher property wealth, we actually saw some areas that went down or saw much smaller movements in their property tax.

In the end, we all kind of ended up subsidizing the softer commercial real estate market. But, in terms of the balance, just on the residential side, we didn’t necessarily see the movement that we expected to see. 

Were there people concerned about that specifically in the run up to this, and this data kind of lets them go, “We were onto something”? 

Yes. So, shout out to Christian Willauer. She’s a Wilmington City Council member. She actually represents the Hilltop area and has been raising concerns that these valuations didn’t make sense. 

And in fact, in Tyler Technologies’ own final report to New Castle County, it notes that its evaluations in many of Wilmington’s communities did not meet industry standards. They just kind of chalk that up to say, well, we tried our best and we’re going to move on to the next thing now. 

That has really infuriated city council leaders, the mayor’s office, as they’ve tried to remedy this. New Castle County has taken a little bit cooler of an approach so far to basically say, well, it was never going to be a perfect system.

So I think for those in the city, it’s been particularly frustrating because the reassessment, in their minds, was going to be a break for many of these struggling homeowners or renters, and instead they’re actually getting tax increases. 

Because in theory, although this lawsuit did many things, the lawsuit that prompted this property tax reassessment was to try to create this more equitable funding landscape. Everyone’s going to pay their share in part, and if your home is worth more you should be paying more. 

Was it supposed to do that all at once? Or is this something that reassessments over time were going to get at?

No, this really was meant to kind of be a rebalancing of the whole system that had not been rebalanced in 30 years, in 30 plus years, 40 years. Delaware is only one of I think a half dozen or fewer states that hadn’t done a reassessment in decades. To most people, they kind of look at Delaware and say this is not a way to do business

This was our way to catch up. 

So if in New Castle County the reassessment had worked in the way that the advocates behind the lawsuit wanted it to work, where would we have seen the blues? Where would we have seen the reds? Again, blue are lower increases and reds are the higher increases.

I think at the very least you would’ve seen areas, like Hilltop and East Side and Southbridge with much cooler reds, if not even blues. They certainly would not be the kind of outlier, in terms of increases over the median. 

Just for instance, I was looking at the data here at the taxes paid on a home in the Hockessin census precinct. Before the reassessment, they were paying about $4,700. After the reassessment, they’re paying $5,100. About 400 bucks. Still went up. It’s an 8% change, on the median. 

But when you look at Hilltop, which is right on basically the west side of Martin Luther King Boulevard there on up the big hill. In 2024, the median tax bill was $505. And after the reassessment, it’s now 13, almost $1,400. So you see an increase of about $800 in Hilltop and yet only $400 in Hockessin.

So highest level takeaway: the assessment didn’t quite work the way New Castle County thought it was going to work, or advocates were hoping it was going to work. For our folks in Kent and Sussex County, highest level takeaway is it seemed to work?

It seemed to work there. There will always be complaints about individual parcels or properties, but on the whole, when we’re looking at a 30,000 foot view, which is what this map kind of gives us, the values seem to move where we thought they would move.

In New Castle County, there are questions that are left to be resolved. 

I want to ask one more “in the weeds” question. You said the third thing you can look for on the map is tax burden, which is how your tax change relates to your assessment.

You all made the decision, you and Tech Impact made the decision, in New Castle County to use the first tax rate. New Castle County famously went through a little bit of hubbub and they ultimately were able to split the rates and change the rates for homeowners and businesses. But you used the initial rates.

Why? If the point is to show tax burden, why not use the actual rates that are hitting people’s bills? 

There were a couple reasons for that. We had more internal debates about, what do we do with this one? It came late in the process of making the map. Do we throw the whole map out and start all over?

But the more we thought about it, we really stuck with our guns about what this map was meant to be, which was checking Tyler Technologies’ homework. And essentially this is what they handed back to New Castle County and said, here’s our homework teacher, grade it. 

And by using the split rate taxes, in a way, we were letting politics influence that because the valuations are the valuations. The split rate taxes are the politicians’ reaction to the outrage following those valuations. So we wanted to really put the onus on Tyler to say, defend or not defend these valuations.

And then, secondly, the split rate taxes are only good for a year. They were a short-term get through the pain of everybody learning to deal with this new reality, but they’re set to expire before the next tax bills come out. And there’s real questions about what the state legislature and the county are going to do in terms of allowing split rates in the future.

So that led us to really lean on the original valuations.

Back to process one more time here. After you did the work of creating the maps, you then wrote this article to try to give the reader some context. But you also did some preliminary sharing of this data with some of the political figures. What was your thinking behind doing that in the article and not just trying to break down the data?

This is a very data heavy endeavor and we didn’t want the impact of it to get lost on readers. We wanted to put a face on it. There’s a reason why an $800 increase in Hilltop matters much more than a $400 increase in Hockessin when it comes to the ability of a homeowner to pay that increase. 

So we took it to city leaders to really outline what has been the impact and what’s been the reaction. I was surprised that they were somewhat unsurprised. Obviously they’ve been raising concerns about this for a while. I had a conversation with Mayor Carney about the findings and he really felt like it was indicative of what he believed was a reality: that the 1983 values weren’t truly 1983 values, especially when you look at areas that have had housing growth that didn’t move as much after the reassessment. 

There’s real questions about “Were you really using 1983 valleys before the reassessment or not?” Because if you were, you would expect the price of a four bedroom, two bath home in Middletown to be pretty low in 1983 versus today’s market. And we didn’t see as much of a movement.

There are real questions kind of about how the county was doing its assessments in the prior years. So if that was the reality though, the onus falls a little bit on New Castle County and falls a little bit on the advocates who basically pushed for this because it’s actually made the reality more inequitable for areas of Wilmington that they had hoped to serve.

If you’re imagining a Spotlight Delaware reader out there, what would you hope they would do with this information that you’ve done all this work for and laid it out for them? If we’re about empowering Delawareans, what does this data do for a Delawarean?

I think it’s twofold. I think in one respect it’s really for our leadership, especially our county leadership. For many months now, New Castle County leadership in particular has defended its process, but I think what the data is telling us is something’s still not right here. I’m not sure that most people would believe that these valuations are on the nose. So there’s work to be done to figure out why that is and what, if anything can be done to remedy it.

Secondly, I think it’s a reminder to the public at large. When we talk about equity, it’s a tough discussion because equity means – again, we’re starting from a zero sum balance – and if someone else is carrying more of the burden that means that somebody else is carrying less. 

One of the things I think got missed in the reassessment conversation is that many people should have expected to see higher bills because you’ve essentially been given 40 years of a break on those increases that just about every other state in this country would’ve been putting on you. I recognize that it’s still a shock to the system when you see those increases. But when it comes to an equitable society, we have to kind of think about ourselves and our ability to pay and the resources to carry that weight, and that if we’re not doing our fair share, then somebody else is doing it for us.

So I think there’s a little bit of that self-reflection that happens when you see some of this data as well. 

We’ll get you out of here on this: as Editor in Chief you’ve talked about it would be great if we did more of these data-driven projects. So after you’ve gone through this whole process, does it give you the appetite for Spotlight Delaware to take on more of these data-driven projects? 

Not next month. Maybe take a little bit of a break. I say that and then like tomorrow I’ll find something that will just be too interesting to not put down.

I will say I loved working with the Tech Impact team. I would definitely work with them again. They’re very hands-on, responsive to what we wanted to do. 

And I think that it really shows the value of what Spotlight can bring the state, because this is something that no one else was doing, no other media outlet was doing, no other government entity was doing. Short of us investing the time and resources to do it, we would just have to take the anecdotal as truth, without being able to back it up with some kind of data-driven approach. 

So the more that we can do that, I think the better the state will be, and hopefully we’re providing real value for people.

I certainly would do it again in a heartbeat, but I’m going to take a little bit of a long break or pass it off to one of my colleagues next time.