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Tax system rebuilt by reassessment
Tuesday, December 26, 2000 By Mark Belko, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The players: Property owners in Allegheny County; Sabre Systems & Service, the Miamisburg, Ohio, firm that was paid $23.9 million to do a reassessment; the Board of Property Assessment, Appeals and Review, which will hear reassessment-related appeals; the county assessment oversight board; and Susan Caisse, chief assessment officer.
What happened in 2000: Preliminary market value notices were mailed for 552,000 properties in the county; property values countywide were to increase on average by 48.17 percent in 2001 based on preliminary numbers; more than 92,000 property owners contested the values either at informal meetings with Sabre or through e-mail or mail-in forms.
Major issue: Was the property value right?
Controversies: Mayor Tom Murphy, unhappy with his preliminary market value, formed a task force to investigate Sabre's work citywide. Preliminary market values in three sections of the city -- southern Highland Park, North Point Breeze and a small slice of Point Breeze -- were reduced after Sabre conceded that mistakes had been made.
Values for several hundred Mt. Lebanon houses were increased after Sabre found that they were undervalued. More than 92,000 property owners sought informal reviews, far higher than the 10 percent anticipated by Sabre. County Council, in a 9-6 vote, rejected a bid to delay the reassessment's implementation until 2002.
The future: Susan Caisse may have one of the most daunting jobs in Allegheny County. She is facing the task of maintaining the accuracy of the county's property assessment system.
It's no small order, as history has shown. As the county's new chief assessment officer, Caisse will be responsible for keeping up to date the massive database of 552,000 properties to be delivered to the county this week as the first countywide reassessment in 20 years draws to a close.
She also will be responsible for doing regular reassessments. Her goal is to update values each year.
She harbors no illusions about the size of the job before her.
"I was 5-foot-8 when I started this job. I've been cut right down to size," the 4-foot-10 Caisse joked last week as she discussed her goals and awaited her formal confirmation by the county's new assessment oversight board.
"It's an extreme challenge. But I'm prepared to go forward. I believe I have the support of everyone involved to make it happen."
Over the years, the county's operation has been battered by an illegal assessment freeze, inadequate technology, massive staff cuts, assessor-property owner negotiated settlements, politics, a warring assessment board and other ailments. The end product was a system so out of whack that few taxpayers had confidence in it.
Caisse, who will be paid $60,000 a year, wants to change all of that. Her goal is to make the county's assessment system "world class."
But first, she and her 28 employees -- in its heyday, the office had 160 -- must brace for the fallout from the countywide revaluation.
"Just getting through the year intact is going to be a challenge," said Caisse.
City residents should start receiving final assessment notices early next month, with tax bills to follow that. Taxpayers in the rest of the county are scheduled to receive final notices the middle of next month, with county tax bills arriving after that.
Property owners who do not like the values will have the chance to appeal to the county's Board of Property Assessment, Appeals and Review. They have until April 2 to do so.
Just how many there will be is anybody's guess.
The preliminary notices mailed in the summer and fall generated 92,707 informal challenges. County Councilman Wayne Fontana, chairman of council's property assessment committee, believes formal appeals could hit 100,000. But others believe the number of appeals will be far lower.
Assessment Board Vice Chairman Michael Suley thinks 30,000 to 35,000 taxpayers will appeal the values set by Sabre.
Wayne Biernacki, president of Real Estate Tax Consultants Inc., which helps property owners with appeals, estimated the number at 10,000 to 20,000.
"It all depends on what Sabre did with the informal appeal process," he said. "If Sabre made the proper adjustment, I assume [taxpayers] won't be back. If Sabre didn't make the proper adjustment, I think they would appeal in January."
Robert Peirce, a tax attorney and former county commissioner, said the backlash doesn't seem to be as strong as it was in 1994, when many properties in the Quaker Valley School District were reassessed. He said he has opened files for more than 200 taxpayers so far but had "four to five times as many in 1994 and the disparity was much greater."
The number of appeals also could depend on the reassessment's impact on tax bills.
Based on his conversations with various municipal officials, Matt Mathews, executive director of the Allegheny League of Municipalities, said that 40 percent to 50 percent of property owners would see no change or little change in their tax bills. Another 25 percent to 30 percent will see their taxes go down and 25 percent to 30 percent will see them go up.
The city, meanwhile, has estimated that 63 percent of its 115,338 residential taxpayers will get tax bills next year that are more than 20 percent bigger than the bills they paid this year; 36 percent will see their bills go up or down by less than 20 percent; and 1 percent will experience a decrease of more than 20 percent.
Sabre is obligated under its contract to handle 8,000 appeals. Anything beyond that would fall to county assessors to defend. Huge numbers of appeals could overwhelm them.
At the same time, county assessors will be trying to learn the nuances of the computer-assisted mass appraisal system that will be used in the future to do regular reassessments.
It adds up to a lot of work.
Caisse said the county is looking at ways "to supplement the work force" next year, whether by using independent contractors temporarily or hiring new people to help overcome the reassessment crunch.
"We certainly can use the help -- let's put it that way," she said when asked whether the county needs to beef up the assessor ranks, which were decimated by layoffs ordered by former County Commissioners Larry Dunn and Bob Cranmer.
Caisse is more than a little familiar with many of the Sabre values. Before starting with the county last month, she was responsible for overseeing the values established by Sabre for commercial and industrial properties in the county.
Previously, she worked as an assessor and a member of the board of assessors in Leominster, Mass., for nearly 20 years. Among her credentials, she is a certified general appraiser, a certified Pennsylvania evaluator and a Massachusetts accredited assessor. And she wants all assessors to become certified Pennsylvania evaluators -- only 10 of 24 are now -- and to earn the highest national accreditation.
"The most important thing in developing a world-class assessing system is creating world-class assessors," she said.
Caisse plans to do in-house training to upgrade the skills of assessors and to teach them to use the computer appraisal system. She said they are eager to learn. Last week, in the bitter cold, assessors were outside with Sabre personnel doing training.
"If that isn't an indication of willingness, I don't know what is. I'm impressed with that," she said. "I believe that we have a good nucleus to develop a world-class assessing system."
Caisse's goal is to adjust property values countywide each year with the help of the computer system and to periodically inspect properties to ensure the county's data is accurate. She plans to place great emphasis on sales in determining property value.
"[Sales] are the tools of our trade, really," she said. "We will be looking at sales every year. They are a barometer for what's going on."
Suley, though, wondered whether Caisse and her employees would be able to keep values accurate.
"There's a learning curve. Most people who have been here for years are just realizing that we're going from a paper culture to high tech. It's just not looking at numbers on a screen. It's analyzing the numbers. It's analyzing what is a good sale," he said.
Suley, who will be leaving office along with the six other current assessment board members at the end of the week unless Commonwealth Court intervenes, also has concerns about the revamped assessment system approved last summer.
It features the oversight board to certify values and a separate assessment board to hear appeals. The county assessment department will be under county Chief Executive Jim Roddey. While Suley said he respects Roddey's leadership, he said he fears the changes could open up the system to political manipulation.
"Let's face it: Would voters be upset with elected officials who didn't raise assessments? I don't think so. Let's remember the court-ordered reassessment came as a result of elected officials supervising the system," he said.
But George Donatello, who supervised the countywide reassessment for Sabre, doesn't believe the county will let the system fall into disrepair again.
"Based on the history, you might want to take a deep breath. But I can't believe from everything I've heard from the administration, from the hiring of qualified people to the training, that they're going to let it go to waste," he said.
Caisse has some experience on her side. When she began her job in Massachusetts, there had not been a full revaluation for many years, the valuation methods were "archaic and the assessment system was generally in a state of disrepair."
That has changed. The system there is more professional now and regular reassessments are the norm, and Caisse believes the same can happen here.
"We just need the wind at our back," she said.
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