The Hampton City Council held a work session on February 12, 2025, from 1:01 PM to 5:40 PM. The meeting featured three main presentations: a briefing on FY2026 real estate assessments, an update on the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind (VSDB) project, and a briefing on the impacts of federal funding changes due to executive orders. Council also entered a closed session for real property discussions and personnel matters. All seven council members were present.
Budget Briefings – City Real Estate Assessments (Item 24-0521)
Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind Project Update (Item 25-0016)
Briefing on Impacts to Federal Funding (Item 25-0025)
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Hampton City Council work session. And with that, I'm going to ask the clerk to uh call the roll. Councilman Bowman. Present. Vice Mayor Brown. Here. Councilwoman Campbell. Present. Councilwoman Fairby here. Councilwoman Harper. Councilwoman Muggler. Present. Mayor Greg. Present. And we have three items on the agenda for presentations this afternoon. And so I'm going to ask the city manager to introduce the first item. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. First off, today we're going to have a briefing on the city assessment process and a recap of the fiscal 2026 assessment roles. We were going to do this last month before the notice cards went out to the public, but as everyone will recall last month when we had our regular scheduled meeting, we had snowstorm, and it wasn't safe to bring everybody out. So we postponed the meeting. As she's coming up to do the presentation, I do want to note that the assessment process is a legal process that really looks at market value of properties. And it must legislatively be divorced from any political consideration about what tax bills are ultimately. Like, wow, this is this is going up quite a bit. Zero transfers, we capture all the transfers that come from the courthouse, whether they're zero transfers, whether they're foreclosures, whatever they may be, the to that's that's involved in the total transfer. Our arm's length sales are the sales that we use to really hone in on the market value of the property. Foreclosures we do not use in determining value or other non-qualifying sales like related parties. If there's incorrect data, if they're had the houses as an example, 5,000 square feet, and we have 3,000 square feet and it sells, and all of a sudden we find that out, then that would be a non-qualifying sale because of the incorrect data. It would not correspond to the actual sale price. So we look at primarily the qualifying arm length sales. We do look at what the listings are doing as well. We are members of the multiple listing system, and so we gather a lot of information from the MLS, which has improved itself as well because most of the properties that are going on the market today that go into multiple listing. We can they take pictures of everything in the house. So you can really see the quality of pretty much the finishes on the interior of the house. So that that's been a big uh resource for us. Um from 2799. So our median sale price has jumped considerably. Any questions on that slide? No. Uh this is the grand total of assessed value. Um as you can see, the total was 22 billion, 144 million 949,400. Um, and so this is the grand total of assessed value, which as you can see is about uh quite a bit of difference between that and last year. Any questions on that? That just gives you an idea. The residential makes up 56% of that, and exempt as you can see, is a quite a large portion uh in the city uh for of assessed value is an exempt category of 21%. Excuse me, uh Libby, so what types of property makes up the exempt category? I mean, we have we have federal property in the city, we have state, federal, city um all of those schools, all of those are exempt properties from taxation. Does this also include the exemption for the uh disabled veterans and those those kinds of things? Yeah, we I've got a slide on that. We'll take a look at that so that you can actually see what what that is.