A three-page court order issued on Aug. 17 directs Allegheny County to begin a countywide reassessment. This arose from a lawsuit filed in Common Pleas Court in Jan. 2025.
The process and timeline are as follows: within 60 days, the plaintiff and the county are to work together to select a special master or an Allegheny County Common Pleas Court judge to oversee the reassessment. If the parties cannot agree, the court will make the appointment. This person is to “ … preside over the reassessment process and … ensure that certain milestones are accomplished in a timely and adequate manner” and will have powers that include enforcing compliance, presiding over status conferences and hearing motions that may change deadlines.
Within six months of the ruling the county is to hire a contractor; within three months after that the reassessment should have begun; the reassessment process “must have materially and substantially commenced … by July 1, 2027 (bold and italics in original). The reassessed values are to be put in place “ … on or before June 30, 2032” and the county is free to complete the process earlier than that date.
If the county takes all the allotted time and has new values ready for June 2032, it will be 19 years from when the current values went into effect. Nine counties in Pennsylvania are planning to have reassessed values in place in either 2027, 2028 or 2029—three of those reassessed sometime after 2013.
As to reassessment method, the court order permits anything the county and its contractor “…deem to be appropriate so long as said methods are accurate, legally-permissible and professionally accepted assessment practices.” Door-to-door and computer-assisted methods are mentioned.
As of this week’s Parcel Counts and Values report, the county has 584,999 parcels and $107.1 billion in total assessed value.
In a news article the county executive said the county will comply with the order; it is unclear what happens with other pending litigation related to a new reassessment.
The county will have conducted three reassessments this century that were all court-ordered. That’s poor public policy compared to carrying out reassessments at regularly scheduled intervals.
