As the late Fred Rogers might have said, “Can you say ‘mess’?”
As bad as Allegheny County’s property assessment system has been – no reassessment in a dozen years that has fueled gross, unconstitutional inequities – the City of Pittsburgh has thrown gasoline on the hot embers.
As the Post-Gazette’s Mark Belko reports, the city has blown raspberries at a state law setting a time limit for refunding money to the increasing number of property owners who have won assessment appeals.
Belko cites chapter and verse the state law – the Second Class City Code — that requires taxpayers to receive those refunds within 30 days of the city being notified by the Board of Property Assessment Appeals and Review that a reduction has been ordered.
Some property owners have been waiting since December or January, the P-G reports.
And the city’s not talking about it. But observers say the delays have a long history.
The report indicates that those who have their property taxes raised in the aftermath of taxing bodies’ appeals are expected to pay the higher amount post-haste.
But of course.
Given recent city controller admonitions that Pittsburgh’s finances rest on a foundation of quicksand – a claim pooh-poohed by the mayoral administration — one has to wonder just how deep that quicksand is.
Speaking of the city’s financial mess, the P-G also reports that “Mayor Ed Gainey has added hundreds of positions to the city budget … as the city’s revenue forecast worsens.”
“During Mr. Gainey’s time in office, the city has added hundreds of new positions that increased the public payroll budget by millions of dollars, putting Pittsburgh in the precarious position of having to fill potential deficits that could soon spiral out of control, records and interviews show,” write reporters Mike Wereschagin and Hallie Lauer
They remind that “the push for more jobs comes as the city confronts a wave of revenue losses driven in part by plummeting values of office towers Downtown, where the city collects a quarter of its property tax revenue.”
Couple that with the coming exhaustion of federal pandemic dollars and the scope of the mess comes into stark perspective.
Some have argued that the assessment appeal losses could not be predicted. Perhaps. But given how broken the system has become and the story on the ground Downtown, that strikes us a weak defense.
But the coming end of pandemic rescue dollars should have been as obvious as the noses on Pittsburgh leaders’ faces.
Sadly, this story likely will not end well. Anyone care to make book that instead of cutting expenses, the city will seek to raise taxes on a dwindling population?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
