Opinion

Commentary

By Scott Wasser swasser@timesleader.com
Vice President of News
Managing Editor

My family just moved back to Northeastern Pennsylvania after being away for eight years, and instead of the Welcome Wagon, we were greeted with a tax reassessment notice.

Read more Property Reassessments articles

It arrived the day after the movers delivered our furniture and about 7,000 cardboard boxes filled with the rest of our junk. Had the notice arrived the same day as the movers, I would have been sorely tempted to send everything back to Delaware.

That’s because the notice announced that the annual tax bill is now $1,439 more than it was before we bought the house three weeks ago. That’s about a 30 percent increase over the previous bill of $4,969 a year.

Even that seemed high compared to other homes in the neighborhood, based on an unscientific survey we did before buying our house. But having heard that Luzerne County was doing its first reassessment in over 40 years with the goal of more equitably distributing the tax burden, I assumed that our taxes would drop a few bucks.

Apparently, I was wrong – not just about our taxes going down, but about the motivation behind the reassessment. I now agree with the dozens of people who called The Times Leader and local radio stations who think the reassessment was a big scam to simply raise taxes.

Granted, people are more likely to call a newspaper or radio station to gripe about their taxes going up than they are to say they were thrilled to learn they’re going down. Nevertheless, I heard from dozens whose tax bill had increased hundreds or thousands of dollars and only two who said their taxes were going down. One guy’s bill dropped $200; the other’s $2.

That’s not a typo. But I hope the newly appraised value of the home of a Dallas Township man mentioned in an accompanying article is. The man says he paid around $200,000 for his house four years ago and was notified by the county that his home is now worth almost $500,000. The poor guy’s taxes are supposed to increase nearly $4,000.

I’ve heard about appreciating property values, but that’s a little ridiculous.

But not as ridiculous as some of the work done by the folks at 21st Century Appraisals Inc., which handled the county’s reassessment. I admit to knowing only slightly more about real estate than I do about cryogenics, but even I know that you can’t accurately appraise a home’s value without walking through it and evaluating things like its physical condition, structural integrity, insulation, and the age and condition of its water, heating, and electrical systems.

Did anybody show up at your house during the reassessment process to check on those things? If not, how did the appraisers come up with the value of your home?

Some of the numbers I’ve seen are so far removed from reality that the appraisers might just as well have gone to a local bazaar and spun the numbers wheel.

Take my new house, for example. We just paid around $320,000 for it, and the Realtor said that was a very fair price. But the county appraisers say it’s worth about $365,000, which helps justify my $1,439 tax increase.

Either their appraisal is way off, or I got such a great deal I should be working for Donald Trump.

The only reason I could afford that house, by the way, is because we made a big profit selling our house in Delaware for around $310,000. No joke. But here’s the punch line: Our annual tax bill on that Delaware home was $1,700 a year.