The Post-Gazette headline said it all this past week:
“Tax relief for Allegheny County homeowners from assessment ruling won’t come quickly – if at all.”
And, we are forced to add, fair, equitable and constitutional property tax assessments won’t come – ever – until our elected leaders show fealty to the rule of law instead of to political expediency.
The P-G headline was on top of a story about how the Pittsburgh Public Schools’ appeal of a Sept. 1 Allegheny County Common Pleas Court order lowering the ratio used to determine the value at which a property should be taxed had stopped the judge’s order from taking effect.
But this constant nibbling around the edges of the peanuts strewn about the floor of the room in which the elephants are housed only furthers the grave disservice to property owners and the Pennsylvania Constitution.
The only way to force the respective counties’ property tax system to meet constitutional muster is for the Legislature to mandate reassessments on a regular schedule (we’ve long preferred every three years) and to base those assessments on respective properties’ full value.
No ifs, and, ors or buts. Or mindless machinations that keep whistling past the graveyard of government’s abject failure to follow the law.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, has repeatedly noted, the Legislature clearly has the power to fix this mess. That it has allowed the pieces of a broken system to be pulverized into something akin to dust – with piecemeal patching that only invited lawsuit after lawsuit and appeal after appeal — is not merely risible but a dereliction of legislative duty.
How much money has been wasted? How many property owners are offloading what they should pay to those who long have been paying too much and who can least afford it? How much longer can civil society tout such nose-thumbing of the commonwealth’s charter?
As Haulk, a Ph.D. economist, also has noted, it is reprehensible that Allegheny County officials, who just as clearly have the power to order a regular reassessment regimen, steadfastly have refused because they fear political fallout.
But sans any semblance of leadership, it’s now long past time for the courts to fully address the elephant in the room. And the longer it waits to do so, too many property taxpayers will be left with peanuts – or nothing at all.
Fixing this mess requires leadership. We’re seeing none.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).