Allegheny County outlines process to challenge property assessments
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Pittsburgh and Mount Oliver property owners will have three chances to challenge both their old and new assessment numbers in the coming months.
Those opportunities will be spelled out in a letter that Allegheny County officials have agreed, albeit reluctantly, to mail to residents of both communities. The letter from the county's Office of Property Assessment will be sent out next week, county solicitor Michael Wojcik said Friday.
City and Mount Oliver property owners will have until Feb. 15 to schedule an informal hearing on their new property values. Those same residents will have until April 2 to sign up for formal appeals of those values that will go into effect in 2013.
April 2 also is the deadline for making formal challenges of their current property values, which will be used for the last time this year to calculate millage rates and tax bills.
Informal appeals, which are heard by representatives from the county Office of Property Assessment, often used to correct math mistakes and errors in property descriptions. Formal appeals are quasi-judicial proceedings overseen by hearing officers from the independent Board of Property Assessment Appeals and Review.
Common Pleas Senior Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr., who is overseeing the controversial $11 million reassessment project, met Thursday and Friday with county officials and lawyers involved in the case to set the timetable for appeals and to draw up the letter. The final wording of the document will be up to Judge Wettick, who was reviewing the text on Friday.
About 8,000 city and Mount Oliver residents already have requested formal appeals.
Informal appeals had been suspended after county Executive Rich Fitzgerald declared the new values "null and void." Facing potential contempt of court charges, his administration has since agreed to send out new reassessment notices as they become available and asked that informal appeals be reinstated.
At the request of Pittsburgh Public Schools, Judge Wettick agreed to delay use of the new property values until 2013, allowing time for owners to challenge their new assessments.
The revaluation of about 600,000 parcels throughout the county is almost complete, and the next batch of reassessment notices are scheduled to be mailed Friday, county officials said.
Those notices will go to property owners in the county's eastern suburbs, which extend from the edge of Pittsburgh to the Westmoreland County line.
Those property owners likely will have the same deadline to file formal appeals, but they may get an extension on asking for an informal appeal.
First Published January 21, 2012 12:00 am
