In April 2022, City Council adopted Resolution 2022-05 requesting that the legislators amend the City Charter to allow the use of county property assessments rather than requiring the city to perform their own. The request was to reduce costs to taxpayers by eliminating duplicative assessments. The measure was passed in May 2022 and Milford taxpayers saw a savings of $347,000 in FY2023.
“So, everybody’s pretty aware of how the state required the counties to all go back and get a reassessment and now the counties are going to be required to do a reassessment every five years,” Suzannah Frederic, Cash Operations and Revenue Supervisor, said. “Kent county went live in 2024, and Sussex County adopted their assessed values in 2025, so we had to wait since we are split between two counties. We are one of only two municipalities split between counties as Smyrna is split between New Castle and Kent.”
Frederick explained that now that the assessments are done, the city is able to adopt the county assessments, but there is legwork that needs to be done. The city has to make sure their records match county records and then get the information into the city’s tax software.
“The city was required to do reassessments every 10 years, so if the county is doing it every five years, we think it would match well for us,” Frederick said. “We have been working with Sussex County. We have more parcels in Sussex County than we do in Kent County so now we’re just matching details. There are times when the county has one zoning and we have another, so we are just cleaning that up, making sure we have the right ownership, making sure all the records are clear.”
Once the data is cleaned up, Frederick expects to be able to provide assessment values in the budget planning. A memo provided to council stated that revenue-neutral taxation was required. The benefits of using the county assessments were the elimination of city reassessment each year at a cost of approximately $500,000, the elimination of annual partial reassessment, saving $30,000 each year and avoidance of the time as well as cost for property assessment appeals as they will now be managed by the county.
