Property Reassessment

September 11, 2008

Pa. court weighs tax assessments

By DAN NEPHIN Associated Press Writer

PITTSBURGH — The property tax assessment system used by every county in the state may not be perfect, but it complies with a constitutional requirement that taxes be fair and equal, a government lawyer told the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Attorneys challenging the so-called “base-year” system on behalf of several property owners argued that it leads to unfair real estate valuations and, thus, unfair tax bills.

The base-year system pegs the tax to a property’s value in a given past year, rather than on its current value.

The longer a county goes without reassessment, the greater the tax disparity can be, they argued.

“It would be like taxing somebody at their 2002 income when they’re making less in 2008,” attorney Ira Weiss said. “No one would put up with that and no one should want to put up with paying taxes on property with 2002 values in 2008.”

The case before the Supreme Court comes from Allegheny County, but the base-year system is used by all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties to determine how valuable a property is.

School districts and municipalities also use the assessment values to calculate property owners’ tax bills.

In October 2005, Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato and county council decided to set 2002 as the base year for assessments, because they said using 2006 property values could mean large tax increases for thousands of people who bought property since the last reassessment in 2002.

Reassessments in 2001 and 2002 led to 180,000 appeals of the county’s 550,000 assessed properties, Allegheny County Solicitor Mike Wojcik told the court. The appeals cost the county $30 million.

“We have a government that has gone through two reassessments ... and saw chaos ensue,” Wojcik said.

Wojcik acknowledged that annual or even constant reassessments may be ideal, but he said that isn’t what state law requires. Nor, he said, would doing so necessarily achieve better results.

“We’re going to have a point where properties go up (and) properties go down. The market fluctuates. The key question is, when do you take the snapshot? And you’re never going to satisfy everyone,” Wojcik said after the arguments.

He said the state constitution requires assessments to be “substantially equal, substantially fair. ... and we feel we’re there.”

Weiss said that, if the court sides with the property owners, “most property owners in the commonwealth would see is a fair reassessment.”

Counties would have to do annual reassessments, unless the state legislature were to enact another standard, such as “a predictable time period” or a statistical standard.

“There should be some direction to counties, because right now counties are ignoring it,” said attorney Donald Driscoll, who represents other Allegheny County homeowners.

“Perhaps because it is unpolitical, but for whatever reason, they’re leaving in place systems that become more and more regressive,” Driscoll said.

Douglas Hill, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, said his group filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the county’s position.

“We do not think it is necessary to reassess every year or virtually every year to maintain equity,” he said, adding annual reassessments would be very costly for counties without yielding significantly different results.

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