Dominick Gambino, Allegheny County’s former property assessment manager, nailed it last week in a Post-Gazette interview:
“Once you’ve dug yourself into a deep hole, the first thing you have to do is to stop digging. That’s what they keep doing.”
“They” are members of the county Board of Property Assessments Appeals and Review, who voted Thursday to petition Common Pleas Court for more shovels, so to speak
The board will ask Common Pleas Judge Alan Hertzberg for the legal authority to return to a past option that gave taxpayers another way to argue for assessment cuts in a badly out-of-whack system.
“If the judge agrees, property owners will be able to seek an assessment reduction based on the common level ratio in their neighborhood or school district rather than in the county as a whole,” the P-G reports.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, repeatedly has reminded, the common level ratio, or CLR, set by a state board, is a median value. “That means half the assessments to sales price are above and half below. And that is based on sales that actually happen.
“But even if it represents the whole set of properties, it means half are underpaying and half overpaying,” the Ph.D. economist stresses.
Thus, the assessment board appears to be asking the public to pay no attention to the giant elephant in a tutu delivering yet another extra-state-constitutional “solution” to preserve the political machinations that have squashed reassessments since the last court-ordered reassessment a dozen years ago.
“They’re just adding another level of meaninglessness that makes things more inequitable,” Gambino, now a tax consultant for municipalities and school districts, tells the P-G.
He says the fact the common level ratio varies from neighborhood to neighborhood shows the kind of inequities that have evolved and proves the need for new – and we would add, regular –reassessments, something Pittsburgh Public Schools has gone to court to force.
“Now we’re going to walk in [to appeal hearings] and have dueling ratio studies. To me it’s like fighting with paper swords,” Gambino told the P-G. “They keep digging themselves deeper and deeper into a mess that no one even understands anymore.”
He says such dueling common level ratios could also open the door for more lawsuits in the form of equity challenges: “You will have some folks in the county paying at 20 percent and others at 70 percent for the same tax,” Gambino argues.
The bottom line remains, as Haulk has noted for decades, that this continuing mess and half measures to “fix” it represent an “explicit violation” of the state Constitution “and use of the CLR points that out clearly.”
And no matter its iteration.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
