At its regular meeting this week, Allegheny County Council will begin the process of considering an ordinance that would “undertake a reassessment of all properties within the County once every three years, with the first such reassessment to take place in 2028.” This would mark a significant win for a recommendation the Allegheny Institute has made for many years.
The county is facing lawsuits at both the Commonwealth Court and Common Pleas Court level, state legislation that would put all counties on a five-year cycle has not advanced since its introduction in July 2025 and the county’s Government Review Commission has spent its initial meetings on the reassessment issue.
A regular timeline would stand in contrast to the proposed ordinance made in the council’s session that ended in December 2025. That would have called for a reassessment when statistical triggers were met and certified.
The proposed ordinance says many of the right things in its preamble: that base-year assessments that stay in place for a long time lead to “owners of depreciating properties … paying more than their appropriate share of the aggregate tax burden, while owners of appreciating properties pay less than their appropriate share,” that court-ordered reassessments present “logistical and budgetary difficulties” and the regular and predictable reassessments would be “more fair and understandable going forward.”
Based on the language of the proposed ordinance, if an initial reassessment is conducted in 2028 it would take effect in 2029 for purposes of new assessed values and adjusted millage rates. Reassessments would either partially or fully be done with “computer-assisted mass appraisal” tools and that would be utilized in the non-reassessment period by the chief assessment officer.
Moving to a more frequent schedule of reassessments would take away sticker shock over new values and reduce appeal activity. A sponsor of the proposed ordinance noted after the recent approval of a long-time owner occupant tax relief program that might “create the environment in which it is more politically feasible to pass the countywide reassessment that I think we desperately need.”
Time will tell.
The Allegheny Institute will monitor and update developments with the proposed ordinance.
