Ah, the silly season is upon us. How else to characterize uninformed loose talk that a long overdue and, in reality, constitutionally mandated property reassessment would automatically lead to a net tax increase for all property owners?
It’s demagoguery, pure and simple.
For the past decade, since the last court-ordered property reassessment in Allegheny County – and for the decade before that before the first court-ordered reassessment — the drum has been beaten regularly by elected officials that fixing the once again badly broken assessment-less system would result in massive tax hikes that would result in even greater inequities.
And that drum is being beaten again in advance of voters going to the polls in November to choose a new county chief executive.
It might be a populist position to take — if you consider the populace ignorami in toto, that is. But it’s a public policy of fools and political opportunists that will only cement and exacerbate the inequities.
The Pennsylvania Constitution mandates uniform taxation. And the only way that edict can be met for property taxes is with regular reassessments.
As this scrivener repeatedly has noted for more than 30 years, various and sundry county officials – past, current and prospective — argue against regular reassessments, claiming they do everything from unfairly spiking tax bills and discouraging new investment, to stifling job growth and fueling population flight.
But it’s simply not true.
And considering Allegheny County’s anemic job growth and continuing population malaise, reasonable people could argue that it’s the lack of regular reassessments that have contributed to those very things.
As the Allegheny Institute noted in 2017:
“When property assessments are not kept up to date and accurate as possible using regularly scheduled and fairly frequent reassessments … all sorts of bad things happen.
“Tremendous inequities arise when some properties are grossly under assessed and others are over assessed. The Constitution of Pennsylvania is clear on this point. That situation should not be allowed to stand.”
Indeed, there likely will be tax hikes that might challenge the sensibilities of property owners long under assessed. But so, too, would regular reassessments keep owners whose properties have lost value from overpaying and subsidizing the under assessed.
But any spiking tax bills could have been mitigated had county government done the responsible thing and reassessed properties every three years. As would anti-windfall provisions in any new reassessments.
As the Allegheny Institute additionally noted in 2017, the only folks who benefit from a poorly executed property reassessment regimen are “the consultants and attorneys handling the appeals.”
Again, as this columnist noted five years ago, and to update for today’s situation on the ground:
Surely it is a form of insanity for those in Allegheny County government – or those who aspire to be in it — to insist that regular reassessments will result in what their nonfeasance indeed causes.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
