The OOR recently ordered the County of Delaware to produce data requested regarding a new county-wide property assessment, even though the preliminary valuations for purposes of determining the new property taxes were only a preliminary step in the process. In Marcavage v. County of Delaware, OOR Docket No.: AP 2020-0457 (March 30, 2020), the decision explains why the County’s arguments for refusing to provide the data were rejected.

For example, it did not fall within the exception for pre-decisional, deliberative matters. In addition, a robust discussion with copious citations in the footnotes provides insights into how the right of privacy applies to requests for the home addresses that are typically included with names of homeowners in the data available for county property assessments.