What are those lines from that 1992 movie, “A Few Good Men,” starring Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise and Demi Moore? Oh, yes: “I want the truth! You can’t handle the truth!”
Which brings us to the latest court nibbling-at-the-edge machinations regarding Allegheny County’s badly broke property assessment system.
The Common Pleas Court judge overseeing the lawsuit regarding which unconstitutional ratio should be used to determine a backlog of property tax appeals has chosen one over another.
And while this ratio, known as the CLR, for common level ratio, matters a great deal to those now stuck in appeal limbo and, in fact, all property taxpayers – the lower the percent of the CLR, the less property taxes everyone will pay (unless the fair market value of the property in appeal is determined to be higher and the owner might end up with a higher tax bill even if the CLR dropped, reminds Eric Montarti, research director at the Allegheny Institute).
And as Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the think tank, reminds, “only if everyone with a higher ratio files successful appeals. And if taxing bodies do not raise millage rates to offset revenue losses owing to appeals.”
“The way the CLR is defined means half are taxed unfairly and half are taxed unfairly low,” the Ph.D. economist says.
And as Montarti further notes:
“It might be worth noting that what is in litigation is the 2020 CLR, originally set at 81.1 for appeals heard between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022, and was ordered in September to be 63.53 by the Common Pleas judge, is now awaiting a hearing at Commonwealth Court due to an appeal by Pittsburgh Public Schools.”
All this said, the legal arguments over what number to use continue to obfuscate the real issue.
That continues to be government’s abject failure to abide by the Pennsylvania Constitution’s uniform taxation clause. But even with the state Legislature’s failure to mandate regular reassessment that would go leaps and bounds in addressing the tax system’s inequities, there’s nothing barring the respective counties from conducting those regular reassessments.
Except politics, that is. And, as Haulk, adds, “Politics of the worst and most ignorant and destructive kind.”
But let’s get to the nub of the rub here, so to speak.
While we indeed understand that judges must adjudicate the specific premises of the respective arguments laid out before them in lawsuits, surely there must come a time when those judges view the facts on the ground and, in this specific case, refuse to be put in the position of deciding which unconstitutional property tax CLR must be used.
We’ll go as far as to argue that any CLR case should have been dismissed based on that very premise.
The overall problem in this property tax assessment legal back and forth is that nobody appears to be willing to state the truth, let alone handle it.
And the longer the state Legislature and counties that refuse to conduct regular reassessments continue to bury their heads in the sand, prosecute lawsuit after lawsuit and appeal after appeal that doesn’t address the real problem, the mess only grows larger and government’s ultimate liability for it grows ever more inequitable and expensive for taxpayers.
Make no mistake, those responsible for such nonfeasance now bordering on misfeasance and malfeasance should be, as Shakespeare so metaphorically implored in Hamlet, hoisted with their own petard.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyintitute.org).
