Zapotosky agrees with state court on property assessments
A Fayette County Commissioner said he agrees with the decision of a state Supreme Court justice who said property tax reassessments should be mandated by the state legislature. “The issue itself rests in the hands of the General Assembly,” said Fayette County Commission Chairman Vincent Zapotosky said. “They have to iron out appropriate guidelines for the assessment of property.” In a recent court ruling, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court noted that Pennsylvania is the only state that allows its counties to indefinitely use a base year for property assessments.
And while Chief Justice Ronald D. Castille, writing for five other justices, ordered Allegheny County officials to conduct a reassessment of its properties, the court stopped short of addressing just how often each county should be forced to assess its properties.
“It is not our charge to determine what may be the best system of reassessment. Nor is this court capable of fixing a point in time at which a base year automatically becomes unconstitutionally non-uniform,” Castille wrote in the April opinion, which found that Allegheny County waited too long between assessments, and people were being unequally taxed.
The solution, he wrote, lies not with the courts, but with the General Assembly.
Fayette County was in the midst of a reassessment until Thursday when the commissioners announced they no longer would move forward implementing the new property values.
Zapotosky said he does not believe that the high court’s ruling will impact Fayette County’s reassessment.
“I don’t think there’s any comparison (between Allegheny and Fayette),” he said.
Commissioner Angela Zimmerlink said that, in response to the court opinion, the General Assembly passed a resolution that calls for a one-year study on assessment reforms by the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee.
She said a final report is due in June 2010, and indicated the results will have an impact on Fayette County.
“As I publicly stated before, it is because of this (resolution), along with other factors that I was of the opinion that Fayette County should halt our reassessment project at this time,” Zimmerlink said.
Commissioner Vincent A. Vicites declined to comment on the court ruling.
The Supreme Court ruling came about after several homeowners challenged the constitutionality of Allegheny County’s assessment process. The court ruled that not conducting assessments often enough is a violation of the uniformity clause in the state constitution. That clause requires equal taxation.
Allegheny County completed an assessment in 2000 for use in the 2001 tax year, and about 90,000 taxpayers filed appeals contesting those values.
Then, Allegheny County completed a second assessment in 2005 for use in 2006, but the county never implemented it.
The court ruling found that the property values in Allegheny County were so out of whack with what they should be, that the court ordered another assessment. The farther away from the base year, the bigger the discrepancy, the court opinion noted. Property values in one school district in Allegheny County fluctuated down 16 percent, or up as high as 35 percent.
“The evidence presented at trial demonstrates that the Allegheny County scheme, which permits a single base-year assessment to be used indefinitely, has resulted in significant disparities in the ratio of assessed value to current actual value in Allegheny County,” Castille wrote.
“The property’s actual value and its assess value remain frozen at the property’s 2002 actual value for as long as the assessment serves as the base year, irrespective of actual changes in value,” Castille wrote.
Continuing to rely on the base-year value “does nothing to ensure uniformity over time unless periodic reassessments are conducted,” he indicated.
The court stopped short, however, of saying how frequently a base-year system needs adjusted.
“Presumably, inequity will arise in such a system at different rates in different taxing authorities, depending upon the stability of property values in the municipality, the variety of real estate existent, and from other market factors. The point at which an unadjusted base-year system becomes constitutionally problematic thus may vary from county to county,” Castille wrote.