Apr 7, 2002 By Christine Haines 4 min read

A Fayette County coal patch isn’t a Pittsburgh neighborhood. It’s not even a Uniontown neighborhood. It presents some unique challenges in the property revaluation process. I live in a coal patch that no longer has a coal mine. When the last assessment was done some 50 years ago, the mine was open. Older residents tell me there was a school and a community band, and the patch had its own police force. Today, the mine and school are closed, the band is remembered by only a few and Luzerne Township has a part-time police force covering a much larger area.

How do you assess a community that was booming 50 years ago but rapidly becoming a ghost town today? How do you determine current market values when few houses have changed hands? We are only the second family to own our 80-year-old house. Many of my neighbors were born and raised in our community. Their children have settled here, too. The market value of a house is based in part on what similar properties in the neighborhood have sold for recently. I can see where that could cause a problem for an assessor in a coal patch.

I recently received my new assessments for my house and the vacant lot I own next to it. My vacant lot went up in value 800 percent since I bought it in 1995, according to the assessment report, and my house was worth 77 percent more than I had paid in 1993. I called for an appointment for an informal review.

The process didn’t cost me anything, unless you count developing a roll of film I had started in November and finally finished by taking pictures of the fire-damaged properties in my neighborhood.

My appointment was on time, and we reviewed the two parcels in 20 minutes. I had been told to bring in any information I had that would justify a lower assessment, including recent home sales in my area or for comparable houses. I also took information on the inflation rate, as based upon the Consumer Price Index. I found the information on the Internet. I don’t know if it will help, but it made sense to me that if inflation since 1993 was 32.6 percent, the increase in the value of my property should be similar.

I found a few sale prices in my neighborhood through the county tax assessment Web site, http://www.fayetteproperty.org. They were all lower than what I paid nine years ago. With the help of a friend who works in a real estate office, I checked books of sales in the county over the past two years and found some sales in other coal patch communities of homes that were similar.

As for my vacant lot, we have more grass to mow now, and a little extra space. But we can’t build on the vacant lots because we don’t have public sewerage in our town and our lots are too small for current septic system requirements.

The assessment crews were unaware of that, apparently. The young man taking my appeal said my lot had been listed as a construction lot. He made a note for it to be changed. I suggested that the company look into the other vacant lot assessments in my community, since no one could build on them either.

I can’t help but wonder about the assessment for the small grocery store in my patch that’s been there since the mine was active. The assessment of $80,000 would be more reasonable for a commercial building in a vibrant downtown area, but our community is dwindling and there is little use for the commercial structure if the current owner ever closes the store. It will probably become another one of our vacant buildings.

In comparison, two active businesses in Brownsville were assessed at about half the value of the company store in a town without a company.

It’s a curious business, assessing a mining patch once the coal mine has closed down.

Christine Haines is a Herald-Standard staff writer. E-mail: chaines@heraldstandard.com.