Pittsburgh residential assessments jump 46 percent
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The city of Pittsburgh's residential properties are now assessed at a total of $10.78 billion, up 46 percent from their prior assessment of $7.33 billion, officials said in the courtroom of Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr. today.
"That would mean everyone whose assessment went up by one-third would actually be paying fewer taxes, if the commercial came in at that amount" of increase, Judge Wettick said.
The city and school district must lower their millage, he noted, so they do not take an illegal windfall from the county's reassessment.
The county is due to finish calculating the assessments of commercial properties by the end of today. The total assessed value of commercial property in the city wasn't available this morning.
Judge Wettick said that once the commercial total is known, the city or county must send it to his office, so he can post it on the county courts website.
"That would give people some idea of whether their taxes will go up or not," he said.
The city can't legally reap any gain from a reassessment, and the schools can only see a 1.7 percent increase in their property tax take. The school district is expected to reset its millage rate at a Jan. 9 meeting, and the city should also be recalculating its rates next month.
The judge denied Allegheny County Council's motion to intervene in the case. The council had said that the judge usurped its powers when he set reassessment certification timetables that are different from the Jan. 15 deadline in county code.
The judge is expected to decide how suburban reassessments will proceed following a Jan. 5 hearing. There has been discussion of suburbs sending out two tax bills -- a preliminary invoice and then a second one when their new assessments are certified -- but the judge said he hopes that "if we all worked real hard" that would not be necessary.
After the hearing, county Manager Jim Flynn defended the county's process of handling informal appeals requests. The county's appeals request line, 412-350-4600, has been busy, and people have reported problems with the online informal appeal request form.
He said the website has been working, to his knowledge, and the county is working to get more staff on the 15 phone lines at the Office of Property Assessments.
About 4,000 appeals have been requested, he said.
He said he has heard anecdotal stories of faulty assessments.
"Any time there's a reassessment, you're going to have some anomalies, that's a fact," he said.
The appeals process should address those, he said.
The timetable set by Judge Wettick, however, placed certification of new assessments before the informal appeals process, he noted. That prevents the county from correcting any neighborhood-wide errors in the reassessment that might be revealed by the informal appeals.
Judge Wettick noted that he originally ruled that every county in the state should reassess regularly. But the state Supreme Court found that assessments should be handled on a county-by-county basis, and told him to compel a reassessment in Allegheny County only.
Ira Weiss, an attorney who represents some of the six property owners whose 2005 lawsuit spurred the reassessment, said anger at the process should not be directed at them.
"The responsible party for the whole mess is the county, and its repeated and stubborn refusal to do what the law has required it to do," he said after the hearing, referring to changes in the timetable requested by the county over the course of the past year.
He said some of the county officials who have opposed the reassessment "wanted confusion. ... They wanted controversy. And that's what we're getting."
First Published December 30, 2011 12:00 am
