As the Post-Gazette headline put it:
“‘A game changer’: Judge gives Allegheny County taxpayers another option to lower property assessments”
But as Jake Haulk, the president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, notes, it’s just more of the same game-playing that has kept the county’s property assessment and appeals process one of the worst-running jokes in the history of local governance.
The P-G says an early September ruling by a Common Pleas Court judge allows property owners to argue during assessment appeal hearings “for a cut in the taxable value of their homes based on the common level ratio in their neighborhood rather than the one used for the county as a whole.”
The county and the state, neglecting their state constitutional duty to see to uniform taxation through regular reassessments, long have relied on the common level ratio (CLR) calculation to determine property taxes during the appeals process.
While some connected with the process call the development a “victory” for taxpayers, Haulk, a Ph.D. economist, says it’s a big loss and merely the latest in a long line of rationalizations for not doing the right thing.
“Localized common level ratios are a ruse that fail to address the problem” Haulk says. “Who defines the local area?
“I agree that the countywide common level ratio is an ineffective way to ensure fairness. But this scheme would be a nightmare to implement. The problem would just change into a different one,” he stresses.
It’s a position shared by Dominick Gambino, a former county assessment director, now a tax consultant for school districts and municipalities.
He told the P-G that the court’s ruling is akin to “allowing the gerrymandering of ratio studies,” when the real solution is a countywide reassessment to correct the growing inequities in the system. That hasn’t happened for a dozen years.
“The result is perpetuating the regressive nature of the assessments,” Gambino says. “We have indeed reached the end of the road to absurdity.”
Haulk says Gambino is spot-on in his assessments view.
“Regular reassessments are the only logical, sensible and fair way to deal with the fairness issue.
“The cost and political machinations of doing localized common level ratios would be staggering and does not deal with the problem. Only regular reassessments can fix that,” Haulk concludes, reiterating his long-held, commonsense and, more importantly, constitutional view.
A separate lawsuit seeking just that by Pittsburgh Public Schools is pending.
The longer Allegheny County merely nibbles at the edges of the property assessments fiasco, the greater the inequities will be as our “leaders” continue to thumb their noses and blow raspberries at the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
