It was one of those times when the computer print-out makes you feel like a prospector staring at a gold nugget in your pan. This was supposed to be a list of farmers participating in a property tax abatement program intended to preserve farmland. Yet the list included the names of some of the richest people and the largest companies in the United States. It included the names of land developers who have played a major role in Delaware transforming farmland into housing tracts.
Several sharpened queries and dozens of field trips to eyeball the 'farms' later we had the basis of our story. Only the interviews remained. Delaware's farmland preservation program had become a means for the owners of big country estates, oil and chemical companies and land developers to avoid paying property taxes. The state law governing the program was too weak to enforce and county officials had stopped trying.
The farmland preservation program actually had the effect of helping to finance land development. In one case, a 400-acre parcel of land zoned for a regional shopping mall avoided $86,000 in property taxes by claiming to be a farm. Nothing save scrub pine trees grew there. The story drew one of the greatest responses from the public and the government of any we have ever published. Within days, governments at every level had appointed task forces to study the abuse.
Legislators and county councilmen were deluged with calls from voters. Reform of the system is likely in the current session of the General Assembly. All this from a routine database. For general reference purposes, we had acquired property records on 9-track tape from each of Delaware's three counties. We also planned to do a story on whether property tax burdens are unfair. You answer that question straightforwardly, using a sample of recent estate sales to determine actual housing market values and then computing the percentage of market value the assessment of each home comprises.
With out-of-date assessments like those in Delaware, you can expect that the most expensive homes will be taxed on the smallest percentage of their actual value. It's a predictable but worthy story. In short, we set out to illustrate something we believed we already knew. Nothing wrong in that, unless we had cruised past the best story. Because we were interested mainly in the assessment of residential properties, we nearly neglected to run a list of...