The president of Allegheny County Council is defending the council’s half-measures in addressing the property tax assessment mess that now has become an ever-deeper crisis.
In a Friday news release, Pat Catena goes through the motions of how unfair calculations of what’s known as the common level ratio (CLR) have been in perpetuating gross inequities in a system that continues to see too many property owners paying more, or less, than what they should be paying.
He specifically defends the council’s decision to extend the appeals process to give property owners more time to challenge the mess. Catena even goes as far as to note how the application of a wrongly calculated CLR violates the state Constitution’s requirement for uniform taxation.
He even talks of the council’s “moral, ethical and equitable duty” to do the right thing.
But Catena stops short of what the council’s true “moral, ethical and equitable duty” must be – calling for a full reassessment and regular reassessment thereafter. You’ll recall the last Allegheny County reassessment, court-ordered, was more than a decade ago.
And as Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, reiterates:
“The idea that a common level ratio can solve inequities is gibberish. By definition, it is the assessment-to-market value where half of the assessed values ratio to sales price of recent sales were higher and half were lower.
“It means that unless all assessments and sales prices are equal, there will be unfair assessments in the recent sales. And that would only be for the recent sales and not all properties,” reminds the Ph.D. economist.
Haulk indeed stipulates that no system – not even periodic reassessments — can eliminate all inequities when market conditions are rapidly changing and changing differently among areas of the county.
“But they can keep gross inequities from arising. And they must be done frequently. For example, every 10 years would not be adequate in most areas,” the think tank scholar says.
The Allegheny Institute long has suggested reassessments every three years.
Haulk calls the idea that appeals should be the means of solving inequities through the fiction of using a CLR “laughable.”
“It requires an expensive bureaucratic undertaking to file the appeal, have it heard and then perhaps appeal the decision,” Haulk stresses, noting that the effort to avoid periodic reassessments in Pennsylvania is “remarkable” and that only five states do not require reassessments periodically.
Some states reassess properties every year, he says.
As Haulk further reminds:
“Even within the half of properties that have assessments ratios under the CLR, there are inequities that cannot be appealed using the CLR. Say the CLR is 0.7. That could include properties at 0.68 assessed-to-sales price and properties at 0.4.”
Haulk’s bottom line — a bottom line that Catena, the rest of the Allegheny County Council and Chief Executive Sara Innamorato should embrace — is that using the CLR in an attempt to correct inequities, “is a fool’s errand — expensive, frustrating, time wasting and ineffective.”
“It creates distrust in government,” Haulk notes, “and it provides opportunities for favoritism — a poison that undermines the relationship of the governors and the governed.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
