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The Effects of a Reassessment Delay

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If you are happy with your assessment and might see your real estate tax bill stay the same or fall as a result of the new numbers, you will have to wait until 2013 to reap the benefits. That’s the message delivered by Judge Wettick based on yesterday’s news that he may be open to delaying the implementation of the new assessments until next year. Additional delay brings the admonition of the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision that the overhaul of the base year be done in "a realistic timeframe" makes one wonder what is meant by realistic.

The benefit of hindsight might have moved the Judge to contract with an outside vendor completely and not the County who so opposed and continues to oppose reassessing and felt that accurate assessments can never be achieved (but are happy to tax assessments whether they be incorrect, correct, or something in-between). An Allegheny Institute recommendation that a sampling of values checked by independent appraisers or real estate experts could have gone a long way to helping with the current situation. Recall at one point in 2009 the Judge even proposed his own four district plan that would have seen the fourth district reassessed by October of 2013. Maybe that plan is coming together by hook or by crook.

Delaying the implementation until 2013 supposedly came at the behest of the Pittsburgh Public School District, which stated it would be very hard to determine its millage rate due to appeals. But that was precisely why the Judge moved the District to the front of the pack-so that it could see the aggregate changes, establish a millage, and send out tax bills.

A year-long delay basically puts Allegheny County back where it was in 2005: new values were released at the beginning of that year so that people could have a year to appeal, taxing bodies could see new values, and then get ready for January 1, 2006. When the new numbers were shown, sticker shock led to panic, which led to various plans before settling on the base year approach. What makes anyone think that the 2012 plan would not be a repeat of those earlier years?

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