Milford City Council approved the 2025-26 tax warrant at a special meeting on August 6. The tax rate will be 60 cents per $100 of assessed value. This reflects a one cent increase per $100 of assessed value from the 2024-25 tax warrant. The increase is the final one cent that allowed the city to stop relying on volatile Realty Transfer Taxes to balance the budget. The change was spread over five years, adding just one cent each year to property taxes.
“This is presented every end of July, usually the first week of August. It’s the official document that says “go ahead and send the taxes out.” This shows that we have a total of $1.465 billion in assessed value in the city of Milford,” Suzannah Frederick, Cash Operations and Revenue Supervisor for the City of Milford said. “Of that, $368 million of that is exempt parcels as they are municipal or non-profits. The DDD exemptions are there, so the total assessed value is just over $1 billion at a tax rate of 60 cents per $100 of assessed value gives us a tax revenue of $6.5 million.”
According to Frederick, the city had 240 applicants approved for the senior tax credit this year which is less than $55,000. Councilman Dan Marabello asked if the assessments concurred with Sussex County’s new assessments.
“We’re split between Kent and Sussex County and Sussex just approved their assessed values in May, so they would not have had time to incorporate them into tax revenue,” Frederick said. “So, I believe that is going to be on the agenda in December or January. Once that is done, we will work with our new software or Tyler Technologies to incorporate the data draws from each county.”
Marabello asked if this could mean an increase to Milford property owners and Frederick stated that she could not say as that would be based on the county. She explained that all those assessments would go through appeals at the county level. The city did not do a reassessment in 2022 in anticipation of the county’s court-ordered reassessment. Councilman Jason James asked if Milford had adopted Sussex assessments and not Kent.
“We have not adopted any county rate,” Frederick said “All our assessments are based on the 2012 assessments. Even if you build a new house now, it will be assessed based on 2012 numbers.”
Mayor Todd Culotta pointed out that there is an appeal process available even if the city adopts assessments based on what the county determines a property value to be. The tax warrant passed with a vote of seven to zero as Councilwoman Madula Kalesis was not present at the meeting.
