The Tribune-Review reports that two of Allegheny County’s top elected officials “are trading barbs over a bill that sought to address the county’s property tax assessment role.”

“Allegheny County Council passed a bill by a 9-6 vote early this month to establish a new chief assessment officer appointed by [the] council that would render calculations each year of the county’s property tax ratios.”

The chief assessment officer now is appointed by the county manager. And Rich Fitzgerald maintains that’s the executive branch’s sole power, per the county’s home rule charter.

“The bill came after Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Alan Hertzberg’s ruling that said the county ‘failed to administer the property tax assessment appeal system in a just and impartial manner,’ and some property owners were given second chances on their property tax appeals.”

But County Council President Pat Catena, D-Carnegie, says he introduced the legislation because Fitzgerald’s appointed assessment boss wasn’t qualified and, as the Trib reports it, “was responsible for the ‘fiasco’ that led to the court intervening in the county’s property tax situation.”

It’s just the latest episode in this long-running soap opera. Cue the organ music.

Talk about a cluster cluck. And talk about the pox on all three branches of Allegheny County government and the state Legislature. For all keep whistling past the proverbial graveyard in steadfastly refusing to deal with the real issue in all this – the group nose-thumbing of the Pennsylvania Constitution.

What slowly, yet consistently, has become a dead letter for far too many in power in far too many areas, the state’s constitution mandates uniform taxation. And that can only be achieved through a regimen of regular and full property tax reassessments.

There has not been a reassessment in Allegheny County in a decade. And that one was court-ordered.

The ACE, in consort with County Council, has the power and the responsibility to see that reassessments regularly, and thus predictably, happen.

And if it doesn’t happen? The courts have a responsibility to note the constitutional flouting and order such reassessments.

The state Legislature has the power to order regular statewide reassessments.

But neither the ACE, the council, the courts nor the Legislature have done their duty.

Their half-measures, their quibbling and their slavish devotion to political expediency have turned the assessments and property tax system into a cruel joke. “Uniformity” is but a quaint notion.

Why would anyone, or any business, seek to locate in Allegheny County with such an inherently broken system? How can the Pennsylvania Constitution be so explicitly ignored?

That none of the controlling legal authorities in the Keystone State have honored their sworn duty to uphold the state’s constitution in this matter is extraordinary. Thus, requires an extraordinary remedy. It’s time for the state Supreme Court to invoke its King’s Bench Power and Power of Extraordinary Jurisdiction.

Per the Unified Judicial System of Pennsylvania (UJSP):

“The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has the power to consider any case pending in a lower court and even some matters not pending in the courts when it sees the need to address an issue of ‘immediate public importance.’ …

“The Supreme Court exercises these powers only on rare occasions,” the UJSP notes. “It has exercised them to take jurisdiction of cases such as those involving election disputes, public employee strikes, prison overcrowding, investigating grand juries, powers of the Legislature and alleged judicial misconduct.”

It’s time to add the fiasco that property assessments have become to the list. That the rule of law is being so egregiously ignored clearly is an issue of “immediate public importance.”

Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).