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Belief in the End of Assessments

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Four years after the state’s highest court had the issue of base year assessments before them they said that the base year idea in and of itself was not bad, just that the way Allegheny County applied it violated the uniformity clause of the PA Constitution. Problems with a base year would arise across the state, but that would happen at different times for different counties.

Not long after a state senator from Allegheny County was quoted as saying "the impression I got from other colleagues around the state is, ‘If the court’s not going to make us do it, we’re not going to do it,’…It just seems like no one’s going to step up here." One long time assessing official from southwestern PA once quipped that upon starting his job colleagues told him that the state would soon be getting rid of property taxes.

That was in 1969.

So a huge grain of salt has to be taken when officials in Washington County prep for a hearing this month on moving forward with a reassessment note "We don’t want to be the last county to go under this process. We want to fight to get it changed." The County last did a reassessment in 1981, but don’t want to spend money on updating values that "might be outdated in three to five years". One official even jested that imprisonment might be on the table, a possibility that residents of Allegheny County who followed the most recent County Executive race might remember.

Why the argument if the County agreed to go forward in 2008 if the state had not yet reformed the assessment process in the state? Nothing happened, and now the County feels that it will?

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