Reassessment explained in Peters Township
McMURRAY – It was standing room only in the auditorium at Peters Township High School, where around 400 people packed the room Monday to have their questions answered about the ongoing Washington County reassessment process.
The event was sponsored by Peters Township Public Library and had to be moved to the high school to accommodate the crowd.
The program’s two main speakers – Scott Fergus, an attorney and director of administration for Washington County, and Susan Key, an attorney with Peacock Keller who filed the lawsuit on behalf of McGuffey and Washington school districts that forced the reassessment – assured those in attendance that they won’t see a tax increase in 2017. County Commissioner Harlan Shober was the moderator.
“We tried to be fair,” Fergus said about the assessment process.
Your Property Reassessment: What Does It Mean? – August 1, 2016 from Peters Township Community TV on Vimeo.
The county mailed property owners their final assessments on July 1. Owners have until Aug. 10 to file an appeal with the county’s tax assessment office using a specific one-page form that can be printed from the county’s website at www.co.washington.pa.us/DocumentCenter/View/2623. When appealing your home’s value, be sure to bring an appraisal, both Fergus and Key said.
The major question from the audience, which included Peters residents and those from other municipalities, was whether their tax bills would be going up. The last county reassessment was in 1981.
“Some will be going up; some will be going down,” Key said.
New property values for the county go into effect Jan. 1. Because school districts follow the state’s fiscal year, which ends June 30, their new property assessment will not go into effect until July 1.
Those who want to know their tax levy, based on property value, will have to wait until later this year in the cases of the county and municipalities, and next spring for school districts.
State law requires counties, cities, boroughs and townships to enact their annual budgets by Dec. 31 of each year, and property values are to be certified by Nov. 15. School districts’ fiscal years, matching those of the state, operate on a July 1 through June 30 calendar.
“All taxes must be equal, and everyone must be taxed at the same (millage) rate,” Key said. By law, county commissioners must reduce the 2017 county millage rate by the same percentage that the assessment values increase.
The same process must be followed by each municipality and school district so they do not receive a windfall from the higher property values. If a municipality or school district wants to increase its tax revenue, it must do so by a separate vote so that there are no hidden tax increases.
The reassessment of the county’s 120,000 property parcels, 80,000 of which are residential, is the result of the lawsuit filed by McGuffey and Washington districts in 2008. The two districts claimed that many properties, particularly commercial and industrial ones, were underassessed and not paying enough in taxes.
“Every house built in the last 35 years was assessed at the 1981 value,” Key said. “The whole county was becoming out of sync.”
The county gave Tyler Technologies Inc. a $6.96 million contract in 2013 to conduct the countywide reassessment. Money for the Tyler contract came from Act 13 funds, the gas drilling impact fee.
The appeals are part of a formal process established by law.
Tyler Technologies Inc., the county’s contractor, convened 15,000 informal reviews from the end of March through May. Like the informal reviews, the appeals will be heard at the Chapman Building, 351 W. Beau St., Washington. The county commissioners have added several auxiliary assessment appeals boards to help hear the large number of expected appeals.