A decade-plus of dickering, fueled by rancid political expediency — with repeated gross factual misrepresentations thrown in — came home to roost this past week when Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) sued Allegheny County to force a countywide property reassessment.
And given the base constitutional issues at the core of the matter – the Pennsylvania Constitution’s mandate that taxation be uniform and the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection mandate – PPS should and will win this lawsuit.
Allegheny County has not reassessed taxable properties in more than a decade. And that last reassessment, in 2012, was court-ordered.
But in the aftermath of that reassessment, former county executives Dan Onorato and Rich Fitzgerald – not wanting to commit what each considered to be “political suicide” during their respective administrations – kicked the proverbial can farther and farther down the road.
Enter new ACE Sara Inammorato. She also was named in the PPS lawsuit filed in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. Consider it a trifecta of dickering county executives.
Have thumb, will apply it to nose and furiously waggle fingers. That’s not how it seems but how it was for Onorato and Fitzgerald and how it continues to be under Innamorato, despite her lip-service to reassessments.
With no regular reassessments, and reliance on the dubious “base-year” method, the assessment system spun into chaos.
In simplest terms, those whose properties had increased in value were not paying their fair share. And those whose properties had decreased in value were paying more than their fair share.
Which led PPS, among some other taxing bodies, to, on an individual basis, appeal upon sale what it considered to be too-low assessments on properties whose values had increased but taxes had not followed suit.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Work from home became a new standard. Office tower values plummeted. Owners appealed their taxes. And they’ve been winning on a regular basis, some seeing their buildings’ assessed values slashed by millions of dollars.
“The erosion of the commercial tax base through the appeal process unfairly shifts tax liability over to residential property owners, who may end up experiencing service cuts and higher tax rates if the situation is ignored,” the lawsuit noted.
Thus enters PPS anew.
Inequities abounding and the rule of law shredded, the school district sought legal relief.
“The inherent flaws of Pennsylvania’s broken assessment system are nationally recognized” argues the lawsuit. “Without any sort of statutory trigger compelling routine county-wide reassessments, the task typically falls to the judiciary to order these reassessments.”
Sadly, it has. And it does once again. But it should be a clarion call to the Pennsylvania Legislature to do its state constitutional duty to act and join the vast majority of states that mandate property reassessments on a regular basis.
That said, the farce that property assessments have been for many decades never was legal nor sustainable. It’s past time for the courts to rule anew, then enforce their ruling under threat of some concrete penalty.
As the lawsuit reminds, a reassessment does not mean a “back-door” tax increase, as too many misrepresenting bureaucrats and pols have claimed.
“A revenue neutral, countywide reassessment will equitably redistribute the tax burden so that everyone pays their fair share of the cost of government,” the PPS lawsuit reminds.
Anti-windfall provisions in state law mean the millage rates of respective taxing bodies must be recalculated post-reassessment, neutering claims of a “clandestine tax increase,” the legal filing adds.
But PPS, we must remind, is not without fault. Its extraordinarily high per-pupil cost has repeatedly yielded extraordinarily low academic results.
And its bricks-and-mortar inventory is too high by nearly half in a school district that steadily has lost students. PPS has begun assessing the overage (at long last). But it must be expedient in remedying the situation and, in the process, economize.
That said, the PPS lawsuit is a very sad testament to generations of politicians at the county and state level refusing to perform their sworn constitutional duty and never learning from history.
There’s no excuse for such shameful and recidivist behavior.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
