High Court: No Hold on Reassessment

Attorney Ira Weiss, says he’s glad the State Supreme Court is not allowing a reassessment delay for Allegheny County. Weiss represents Allegheny property owners that filed a lawsuit saying a base-year assessment was unconstitutional. A lower court agreed with the plaintiffs but the county quickly asked the higher court for a stay until the state legislature could act. The State House has passed a measure putting a hold on any reassessments but the senate is yet to act. The ruling means the issue now goes back to Judge Stanton Wettick who will decide how the county should proceeded with the reassessment of every property. County Executive Dan
Onorato says he thinks it will be months before the judge issues an order and he hopes the statewide moratorium will be in place by then. The ultimate goal is to change the state’s assessment laws altogether. Onorato says, “I will do everything in my power to prevent a reassessment if the other counties around us do not have to [reassess].”
Ira Weiss says the claim that the county is being victimized for having to reassess is purely fiction. “If you look at other counties that have not had reassessments in a long time, you’ll find that their millage [rates] are much higher than Allegheny County,” Says Weiss. “You need to look at all the numbers to figure out what the tax load is.”
Weiss says the legislation pending in the house (SB 1661) is irrelevant to Allegheny County’s situation. He says he thinks it won’t do any good. “This issue had been studied to death. There is really nothing more to learn about the different systems,” Weiss says. “To me, the notion of placing a hold on the constitutional mandate of fair assessment for the purpose of study is simply to put off the inevitable.”
Onorato counters, “No one is going to convince me how you can explain why Allegheny County has to do one when the counties that border us do not. That makes absolutely no sense… I don’t know how that survives the uniformity clause. It makes no common sense.”