Examining Exempt Property

On January 15^th, the Acting Chief Assessment Officer of the County, pursuant to the administrative code, certified the “adjusted value of real property appearing on the assessment rolls of Allegheny County”.  That certification shows that the total value of real estate in the County was $98,030,298,609.  Taxable property constituted $75 billion of the total, with exempt property (including public utility property) totaling $23 billion.

The issue of exempt property has been a hot-button issue for local government, specifically the exempt property that is owned by non-profit or charitable owners, particularly hospitals and health care related owners.  It is important to note that the $23 billion total of exempt value includes a lot more than just property owned by non-profits: it includes government owned (Federal, state, local, school, authority) and other uses as well.

So where are the heavy concentrations of exempt property?  The certification separately breaks out values in the four cities in the County (Pittsburgh, Clairton, Duquesne, and McKeesport) and the percentages of total value in those municipalities are 41%, 27%, 23%, and 36% respectively.  In municipalities that are boroughs, the percentage is 14%; in townships it is 16%.

We can look lower as well.  In the City of Pittsburgh three wards have more than 50% of the total property value accounted for by exempt property: Ward 1, which is mostly the Downtown CBD, is 57% exempt; Ward 4, which is Oakland, is 77% exempt; and Ward 22, which comprises part of the North Side, is 71% exempt.  Those three wards together account for $5.4 billion (44%) of the City’s exempt property value.

Outside of Pittsburgh and the three other cities there are only two municipalities in the County where exempt value is greater than 50% of the total value of property.  In Rankin the exempt percentage is 52% ($20.8 million exempt to $18.9 million taxable) and Findlay, home to Pittsburgh International Airport, has 68% of its total value accounted for by exempt property ($1.4 billion exempt to $681 million taxable).