In previous blogs we wrote about the possible reassessment in Lackawanna County in northeast Pennsylvania–a question was placed on the ballot for last Tuesday by County Commissioners asking the electorate if they wanted the County to incur debt in order to conduct the first reassessment in fifty years. There was a lawsuit over the nature of the ballot question, which the County courts upheld; the County then appealed to Commonwealth Court, but that court likewise ruled on the day of the election that the question’s results would not stand. The question was defeated by the voters.
So is it over? Maybe, but at its most recent meeting the Scranton City Council passed a motion to authorize a lawsuit to force the County to carry out a reassessment. Recall that in Washington County it was a lawsuit by two school districts that forced the issue into the courts and then ultimately to a reassessment that went into effect last year.
In a 2009 review of property assessment methods, the Pennsylvania Legislative and Budget Finance Committee reviewed five court-ordered reassessments that occurred in the 1990s in Lancaster, Chester, Dauphin, Carbon, and Erie Counties. In none of those cases was a county sued by another political subdivision (municipality or school district) to carry out a reassessment, but all experienced one or more critical factors that caused a reassessment, whether related to demographics and economics (redevelopment, population shifts), methods of valuation (base year for some, current value for others, for example), selective reassessments, an acknowledgement that there was a need for reassessment, and/or significant time since the previous reassessment.
If the City decides to pursue the matter it could bring the issue of “the staleness of a base year” into question. In the 2009 lawsuit over Allegheny County’s assessment policies that ended up in front of the Supreme Court in 2009, the Court’s majority opinion noted “the difficulty–and the risk to an authority employing an unadjusted base year system–is in determining the point at which a base year deviates to an extent where reassessment would be required”.
Any guesses as to which will come first: an appearance in front of a court by Lackawanna County officials in response to a lawsuit, a state law prescribing a reassessment cycle for counties, or a state law carrying out the homestead exemption changes voted on last week in a statewide referendum?
