East suburban residents unhappy
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Robert Tomasic says the only way he could get $60,000 for his house in North Braddock would be if he put in $10,000 to $15,000 worth of renovations first.
Facing a 19 percent increase in the assessment for his home on General Braddock Drive, he said he realized he is one of the more fortunate property owners in the borough where overall property values rose 15 percent.
"I got a letter from a lady whose assessment almost doubled," Mr. Tomasic said on Friday. "I know people whose homes on Hawkins Avenue were assessed at $10,000, and they went up to $20,000 or $25,000. You tell me how they arrive at these figures."
"These figures" are the new property values for communities in Allegheny County's eastern suburbs. County statistics show that the total value of all taxable real estate there rose 26 percent since the 2002 reassessment.
What is raising eyebrows is that some of the largest assessment increases are appearing in the less affluent areas of the county, like Braddock, 34 percent; Rankin, 75 percent; and Clairton, 42 percent.
Those increases are much higher than new aggregate values reported for places like Monroeville, 26 percent, and Plum, 23 percent.
If those new values hold, they would appear to defeat one of the main purposes of the reassessment ordered by the state Supreme Court.
Reassessment was the result of several lawsuits filed by property owners whose attorneys successfully argued that the county's base-year assessment system was unfair to residents of poorer municipalities. Real estate in less affluent communities was losing value or gaining value more slowly than in many wealthier communities, lawyers said. The result, over time, was to shift a disproportionate share of property taxes onto residents in those poorer places.
Don Driscoll, one of the lawyers who sued the county, said Friday that he was troubled by reassessment results he had seen so far. Preliminary indications were of "systematic non-uniformity" in the new values, he said.
A 2005 reassessment that was rejected by county officials showed that property values in Rankin had risen only about 6 percent, Mr. Driscoll said. That calls into question a large jump in Rankin assessments over the next five years, he said.
First Published February 4, 2012 12:00 am
