A fun way to pass the time at Allegheny County Council meetings is trying to figure out who will sue the county when the next tax bill passes.

Take last week's effort. After narrowly defeating a bill that would freeze assessments at their current levels for a fourth year, council voted to cap any property assessment increases at 4 percent.

Lawyers are now waiting by the phones for your calls. This cap ensures that if your property is fairly assessed, you'll be paying way more than you ought to the next few years, because some of your neighbors are getting a huge break.

Why is that? Isn't capping the increases good for all?

Not on your autographed picture of Charles Ponzi. But it takes some figuring to see why, and the majority of council members figure most won't get around to it.

Stay with me here. It may be rough sledding. Let's say a county has $1 billion worth of real estate value, and new assessment kicks that up by 20 percent. That's comparable to what happened in Allegheny County. Anyway, now you're at $1.2 billion.

By state law, the county can't take that entire increase in taxes. Nor can your school board. Nor can your municipality. The most a taxing jurisdiction is allowed through an assessment windfall is a 5 percent increase.

That means they all have to cut your millage if assessments go up more than 5 percent. The idea that your assessment increase must equal your tax increase was never true. Any questions so far?

OK, now Councilman Ron Francis, R-Ben Avon, figures if the assessments had been allowed to run their course, with appeals and so forth, the county could have cut its millage from 4.69 to the neighborhood of 4.

Francis figures further that anyone whose assessment rose less than 15 percent would actually save money once the rate cut took place. He may be overestimating, but it's almost certainly true that a couple of hundred thousand property owners would have done better with a millage cut than an assessment freeze. And now there won't be any millage cut.

Our new Slurpee tax system with its semi-freeze is coming with a bit of sunshine, however. In an unexpected turn that shocked even the bill's sponsor, council voted 8-6 in favor of Francis' idea to let all property owners see what their taxes would have been if this freeze had never come.

Francis believes his bill will expose the unfairness of county Chief Executive Dan Onorato's tax cap. Can you imagine how delighted some taxpayers will be when they open their 2006 tax envelope?

"Hey, honey, look. It says here we should only be paying $3,000, but they're going to have us pay $3,400 anyway. Oh, and the county promises to make this fair after we pay just three more years of taxes. What'll they think of next, eh?"

The numbers are less important than the reality. Onorato's plan was popular because it was easy to understand. Assessment increases? Bad. Assessment caps? Good.

Hey, half the people reading this column already have dropped out rather than deal with all these numbers. I know my head hurts typing them.

But you know what will be easy to understand? The two tax figures people get on their tax bills. Those who are told to pay the higher number aren't going to be very happy, particularly when they hear that this cap benefits the richest communities the most.

Councilman Bill Robinson, D-Hill District, was the lone Democrat to side with the Republicans on this sunshine bill. Robinson said he wanted to give citizens all the information available.

"Transparency is the best process," Robinson said.

He also had this thought: The assessment system should be fixed, since we're spending tens of millions of dollars on it and all. But since the votes weren't there for that, telling people the deal they're not getting will have to do.