Politicians and administrators of the real estate tax in Allegheny County during the past decade have given the real estate tax an undeserved bad name.

Ten years ago Republican County Commissioners Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer froze assessments and fired 40 assessors. It turned out to be one of the costliest mistakes in county history.

The freeze was declared unconstitutional by Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr., who, on the basis of anecdotal evidence, ordered a countywide reassessment for 2001 that cost taxpayers $30 million. More than 90,000 appeals, one for every six residential taxpayers, were filed, which eliminated most of the gross inequities of what turned out to be a substandard reassessment.

	Raymond L. Richman is professor emeritus of public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh (rayrwtcr@aol.com). Graphic Allegheny County's ailing assessments

County Chief Executive Jim Roddy then foolishly ordered another countywide reassessment for 2002 that cost additional millions and would have caused another 90,000 appeals if Judge Wettick had not ordered the results of the 2001 appeals to apply to the 2002 assessment roll, as well. To avoid still more unhappiness, County Council froze the 2002 assessments for three years, to 2006.

And then, when the 2006 assessment roll was revealed, and it became clear that some assessments would go way up (even though others would go way down), County Council, at the urging of County Chief Executive Dan Onorato, froze the 2002 assessments indefinitely out of an understandable fear of the voters' wrath.

The total cost to taxpayers of this continuing fiasco has been more than a million dollars per fired assessor, and assessments today are no better than they were 10 years ago. Meanwhile, the constitutionality of using 2002 as a base-year is under court challenge.

Using sales data graciously made available to me as a public service by Pittsburgh's RealStats (which provides assessment and sales data to the real estate community, school boards, municipalities, attorneys and taxpayers), I analyzed the ratios of assessed value to sales prices of all houses sold from January 2005 through June 2006.

In 2002, the median ratio of assessment to sales price was 98.1 percent. Currently it is 86 percent, a direct result of assessments being frozen as sales prices have risen.

The average assessment ratio of residences sold ranged from a low of 56 percent in Pittsburgh's 9th Ward to 119 percent in the 13th Ward. That is to say that, on the average, homeowners in the 13th Ward are being taxed at twice the rate of those in the 9th Ward.

In Allegheny County, excluding Pittsburgh, the average ratios of assessed values to sales prices ranged from 73 percent in Edgeworth and Edgewood boroughs to 165 percent in North Braddock.

Assessors are considered to have done their jobs well when half of the ratios fall between 85 percent and 115 percent of the average. None of Allegheny County's assessments met that criterion in any Pittsburgh ward, although the 14th Ward came close. About 20 percent of assessments in the municipalities outside of Pittsburgh met the criterion, all in relatively homogeneous bedroom communities in the suburbs.

Why are Allegheny County's assessments so substandard?

My analysis indicates that the computer assisted methods of appraisal (CAMA) employed by the county work well in relatively homogeneous communities like Pittsburgh's bedroom suburbs, but in the older municipalities, CAMA is unable to identify comparable properties with any semblance of accuracy. Only assessors familiar with the properties in older neighborhoods can identify comparable properties.

In such neighborhoods, the assessor's role is to examine all sales whose ratios are outside the prescribed limits and determine the cause. The process is similar to statistical quality control in manufacturing. If the assessor finds comparable properties subject to the same problems, those properties are reassessed.

Analyzing assessments is a continuous process with changes made by assessors throughout each year. The values on the last day of one year become the initial values for the next year's assessment roll. All that is needed is decent supervision and politicians intelligent enough to let the assessors do their job without meddling.

So what should Allegheny County do now to straighten out its assessments so that they could be adjusted with reasonable accuracy year-by-year?

First, it should conduct a comparative assessment-to-sales ratio study for 2005 and the first eight months of 2006, which would provide an accurate reading on the current condition of the assessment roll. I estimate this would take four people only 15 work days using data available from Murrer and Co. or from the county's own records. With this analysis and under competent supervision, the existing assessment staff could correct most of the bad assessments within 60 days and produce a decent assessment roll for 2007.

No assessment roll is ever a perfect predictor of what individual parcels will sell for, but this approach would allow the county to meet the generally accepted criteria outlined above.

There are other potential long-term solutions. One would be to follow the California model and virtually eliminate the need for assessors by accepting the existing (or improved) assessment roll, imposing limits on increases in real estate levies by municipalities and school districts, limiting increases in assessments to changes in the consumer or some other price index and assessing newly sold properties at their sales prices. The system has worked in California for 25 years.

The downside is that it creates great disparities in assessments of comparable properties, but when someone buys a property, he or she knows what the real estate tax will be and negotiates a purchase price accordingly. Homeowners who dwell in the same house for long periods are the principal bene-ficiaries. Seniors, in particular, would benefit by the protection afforded against sudden changes in assessments and tax levies.

Any such fix would need to be long-term and statewide, however, and Allegheny County needs to do something now. It must bring to an end the assessment fiasco of the past decade.