As part of an ongoing effort to bring stability to Allegheny County’s troubled property assessment system, County Council will consider a bill to ensure the county uses a consistent approach in updating property values.
“It's meant so that all of the agencies that are dealing with assessments are speaking the same language,” said Republican Suzanne Filiaggi, who introduced the legislation.
The bill requires the county’s Office of Property Assessments to use widely accepted state and international standards when validating real estate sales data. It’s part of an effort to eliminate artificial inflation of the Common Level Ratio (CLR), a calculation meant to adjust recently appealed assessments so they’re in keeping with values the county assigned during the last full reassessment in 2012.
Filiaggi said that there’s no reason to think the county isn’t already following the best practices laid out by the State Tax Equalization Board and International Association of Assessing Officers. She said the bill is “designed to engender trust with the taxpayers and the taxing bodies of Allegheny County, to assure them that we're codifying what should be going on.”
That trust has been eroded in recent years. The legislation is in part a response to a 2021 lawsuit that alleged the CLR had been inflated, resulting in higher tax bills for recently reassessed properties. An ensuing court mandate drastically lowered the CLR.
The reduction has been a boon to commercial property owners, including more than a dozen Downtown (who sought and won lower tax assessments in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic). Meanwhile, it’s been disastrous for local governments and school districts that rely on real estate tax revenue.
With the looming possibility of a court-ordered reassessment thanks to a Pittsburgh Public Schools lawsuit filed earlier this year, council members have introduced a number of bills meant to ease the pain of future reassessments.
Council is “trying to create a record” that officials are making a good-faith effort to address the problems brought up in court, Filiaggi said. “We're trying to clean things up because we want transparency, and we want to promote uniformity. Because that is what all of these cases … [are] about: uniformity.”
Some warn the legislation might not have the impact supporters hope.
John Silvestri, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the CLR case, said the bill is basing its standards on recommendations from agencies that are “typically decades behind” best practices, leaving their guidelines “outdated.”
“What would be helpful is an independent audit of the sales information” the county submits for calculating the CLR. Such a review would ensure the Office of Property Assessments has correctly validated transaction data, he said.
Mandating that the county follows the standards would be like putting a “tuxedo on a pig,” said Dominick Gambino, a critic of the “base year” system under which the county currently operates. Gambino owns Diversified Municipal Services, a company that consults for schools, municipalities and counties regarding assessments. He also led a full reassessment when he managed Allegheny County’s Office of Property Assessments from 2001 through 2003.
He argues that the CLR would be unnecessary if there were regular countywide reassessments.
But Filiaggi said that officials would have to rely on the CLR in the years between assessments. Any inconsistencies in the data could be “much more easily detected” with standards in place, she added.
“Nobody should have to be looking for a needle in a haystack. This is data and should be easy to figure this out,” she said.
Filiaggi’s bill is pending before council's committee on assessment practices.
