A Pittsburgh-based economic justice advocacy group has sued the state of Pennsylvania in Commonwealth Court, demanding that it establish uniform standards for conducting property reassessments for all of its 67 counties.
"Extremely outdated property assessments have resulted in approximately 70% of the counties across Pennsylvania imposing unfair and regressive assessments," said a statement from attorney Kevin Quisenberry of the Community Justice Project, which filed the suit. "Owners of lower-value properties are overtaxed relative to higher-value properties. This broken system violates the Pennsylvania Constitution."
The suit names Gov. Josh Shapiro and state Attorney General Dave Sunday in their official capacities. Shapiro's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday: A spokesperson for Sunday said the office had not been served with a copy of the complaint.
Currently, counties largely decide for themselves how often to reassess property values, with years or decades elapsing between reassessments. But the complaint, filed on behalf of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, alleges that such an approach is unconstitutional because it allows counties "to decide individually, without any standards, how to assess real property for property taxation purposes."
And that, the 12-page complaint alleges, "has resulted in a haphazard, grossly non-uniform, and arbitrary property assessment system."
The problem is especially acute in areas that have deteriorated since the last assessment — particularly communities suffering from higher rates of poverty and unemployment. According to the suit, a member of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee lives in a Westmoreland County home assessed at twice the value it would fetch if put up for sale — meaning its owner carries twice the burden that is fair.
"Unemployed homeowners are desperate for relief from over-assessment," said Barney Oursler, who leads the Mon Valley economic-justice group, which advocates for unemployed workers.
Pennsylvania's constitution requires that similarly situated taxpayers be taxed uniformly. But the suit notes that 50 counties are using property assessment data that is at least 15 years old, with several counties using values first calculated a half-century ago or more. Citing an earlier state Supreme Court precedent that involved valuations in Allegheny County, the suit asserts that such delays "result in assessment non-uniformity because 'property values may change over time and at different rates.'"
Those disparities create a "deeply unequal, regressive property assessment system," the suit says. And it contends that the application of the state's assessment laws violates the Pennsylvania constitution by "failing to set standards guiding and restraining how counties should implement their property taxation responsibilities" — including how often to conduct assessments.
As a remedy, it asks the court to declare the county-by-county approach unconstitutional and to direct counties "to assess properties … in accordance with their remaining authority" under state law.
The suit echoes arguments that have been made for years by local officials — who in Allegheny County, at least, have been bedeviled by lawsuits filed over their own property valuations.
County Executive Sara Innamorato and Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey — who both previously served in the state legislature — pleaded last year for Harrisburg to level the playing field between counties.
"We are standing alone as the only state that doesn't mandate it," Innamorato told WESA in a joint interview with Gainey.
Local officials are often wary of initiating regular reassessments on their own — especially when counties nearby may be using decades-old values that may seem like a better bargain. ("I haven't met an elected official that comes out and [says] 'I'm going to enjoy doing reassessments," Gainey told WESA. "If that was the case, we wouldn't be in this situation.")
Historically, it has fallen to the courts to order such reassessments when values get far enough out of whack that a judge feels obliged to compel a reevaluation after property owners to sue. Experts say the result is "the worst of both worlds" — hard-to-predict spikes in value as the system lurches toward reassessment, interspersed with periods where the newly established values slowly revert to their distorted levels.
If the arguments in the suit are familiar, so are some of the names attached to it. The case was filed by the Community Justice Project, whose lawyers filed a key challenge to Allegheny County's assessment practices in 2005. Initially brought forward in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, that suit resulted in then-Judge Stanton Wettick ordering a countywide reassessment after determining that the state's assessment law, and the county's application of it, were unconstitutional: The state Supreme Court in 2009 upheld Wettick's order, but without tossing aside state law entirely.
Writing for a court majority, then-Chief Justice Ronald Castille acknowledged that Allegheny County's reliance on years-old valuations produced disparate values, and that "the disparity is most often to the disadvantage of owners of properties in lower-value neighborhoods."
But he also wrote that the court shouldn't toss out state laws unless they make it impossible for fair results to be obtained. "It appears there are circumstances where the base year provisions could be constitutionally applied," Castille wrote — if, for example, a county conducted reassessments more regularly.
The new lawsuit was filed in Commonwealth Court, a statewide judicial body that handles complaints against state and local government agencies.
The complaint doesn't seek specific policy changes like mandating a specific timetable for reassessments. But some state officials seem open to the possibility. State Sen. Wayne Fontana, an Allegheny County Democrat, has suggested setting a five-year reassessment timetable statewide, though he has yet to propose legislation to that effect.
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