Reconciliation efforts begin for challenged Washington assessments
Washington County’s court-ordered property reassessment entered a new chapter with the start of reconciliation hearings for 1,100 appellants.
“Over 120,000 properties had to be reassessed,” county Commissioner Harlan G. Shober Jr. said recently.
From that came 12,000 appeals, both informal and formal, tackled over several months by the county’s permanent Board of Assessment Appeals as well as four auxiliary appeals boards named last summer.
That left 1,100 unresolved appeals that could go on to the county’s Court of Common Pleas if the county and the property owners can’t find reconciliation.
“It is a complex problem,” board of commissioners Chairman Larry Maggi said at the Cecil Township event. “We spent $7-9 million to accomplish nothing.”
Reassessments were ordered after the state Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in favor of the Washington and McGuffey school districts, which sued in 2008 seeking reassessment.
That forced the county to hire Ohio-based Tyler Technologies to conduct an $8 million update of Washington County property values last done in 1981. Results of that effort were received by property owners in March and were followed by informal appeals conducted in April and May.
Shuber said the total valuation of properties in the county rose from $6.6 billion in 1981 to $17.4 billion last year.
There also was a change in the basis for taxing those properties, from 25 percent of 1981 values to 100 percent of those determined in the recent reassessment.
As a result, on Dec. 15 the county commissioners passed a $178 million 2017 budget that turned a 24.9-mill tax rate into a 2.43-mill levy, though with no change in tax bills for property owners.
Because of state law that requires a revenue-neutral conversion of tax rates, the commissioners said the county had to find a way to budget the cost of reassessments without raising taxes.
Shuber said the cost of reassessments were covered “thanks to Act 13,” the natural gas impact fee law, but added, “that money could have been spent on something else.”
The 2016 reassessment may have to be repeated in the not-too-distant future.
“The real estate market is volatile,” board Vice Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan said. She predicted that in three to five years the assessments done last year already will be out of what could be called a fair factor.