Last week Allegheny County Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. found the base-year system of real estate assessment, which Allegheny and many other Pennsylvania counties have used to avoid politically difficult reassessments, to be unconstitutional.

Robert P. Strauss is a professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University (rs9f@andrew.cmu.edu).

His opinion also points out that Allegheny County violated its own administrative code by ignoring national fairness standards it was required to apply -- and then tried to avoid this problem (illegality?) by simply repealing this obligation.

Still, Judge Wettick was extremely generous to Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato in several important ways.

First, he delayed issuing his widely expected adverse decision until well after last month's primary election. Had he handed down the decision in early spring, a serious Republican challenger might have run against Mr. Onorato. Instead, Mr. Onorato was elected not only as the Democratic candidate but also as the Republican candidate -- by getting more write-in votes than a nominal GOP contender.

Second, the judge ordered a reassessment in 2008 that would not have to be implemented until 2009. He could have moved the timetable up a year but decided against it so the county could conduct an orderly process of reassessment rather than a no-huddle one.

Despite these de facto favors from Judge Wettick, Mr. Onorato apparently has decided to take the low road by announcing that the county plans to appeal the judge's ruling. Clearly, Mr. Onorato's primary rationale for moving from a current market-value assessment system to a base-year system is to avoid having to go through a reassessment while running for re-election. After all, he's been willing to countenance the inequities in the 2002 base-year assessments for political convenience, even though he denounced his predecessor for creating them and vowed to correct them.

Given that he is now a shoo-in for re-election, Mr. Onorato could take the high road by simply accepting Judge Wettick's decision and working to make sure Allegheny County assessments are fair. This also would pressure other base-year counties to update their assessments rather than allow disparities to widen with the passage of time.

Instead, by filing an appeal to Judge Wettick's latest decision, Mr. Onorato would further forestall having to reassess during his second term, as he fashions himself to run for governor. Since Mr. Onorato's base-year system favors the well-to-do whose properties are increasing in value while overtaxing the less fortunate whose property values are falling, this would amount to running as an opponent of fairness -- an odd thing for a Democrat, but consistent with Mr. Onorato's posturing to date.

It will be interesting to see whether the county Democratic Party will pressure Mr. Onorato to forgo an appeal and get on with a reassessment based on current market value. Aside from producing a fairer tax system across the county, this would help the city of Pittsburgh, which essentially remains in bankruptcy, and stave off pressure for a large tax-rate increase for the Pittsburgh public schools. It also would help other school districts facing a difficult financial time.

It will be equally interesting to see whether Gov. Ed Rendell pressures Mr. Onorato to accept the decision and where the various public employee unions come out on the matter -- not to mention the reaction of the General Assembly.

Members of the Pennsylvania House apparently are engaging in actual oversight these days, asking tough questions about the governor's budget proposal and bringing sunshine into their operations. The question is whether they have the courage to do what should have been done more than 100 years ago -- by requiring regular and uniform property assessments statewide and by providing meaningful oversight and funding for the local assessment process.

By reviewing assessment practices throughout the commonwealth and around the nation, Judge Wettick worked hard to develop a careful, empirically based set of arguments that supported his decision. A crucial finding was that the base-year method inevitably leads to nonuniform, and therefore unconstitutional, real-estate assessments. If there is an appeal, Allegheny County likely will include among its arguments that "inevitability" is not a legal standard of constitutional analysis.

My best guess is that when the legal maneuvering is over, which almost certainly will require a state Supreme Court ruling, Judge Wettick's decision will stand. Mr. Onorato's initial impulse to appeal and, in particular, his assertion that Judge Wettick overstepped his authority by setting a date for a reassessment, is embarrassing. Mr. Onorato, as a trained attorney, knows full well that this remedy is well within the bounds of what other judges in Pennsylvania have ordered after finding assessments nonuniform. What's different here is that Judge Wettick has challenged the widely used base-year method as inherently unconstitutional no matter where it is employed.

One question Mr. Onorato and other elected officials around the state should think about is whether continued failure to achieve fairness in real-estate taxation not only works against the public interest but also against their own political interests. One can read the lopsided vote against Act 1 last month as a thundering message from the electorate that it's time for elected officials to get on with the people's business in a meaningful way and to stop the political shucking and jiving.

Further litigation in favor of the status quo in our real-estate assessments, which are demonstrably unfair, is not political leadership. Rather, it's a desperate gasp of the political class.