Dec 26, 2017 3 min read

Anyone who makes a family budget around the kitchen table knows you can’t make good financial decisions unless you know exactly how much money is coming into the household.

You can’t spend what you don’t have.

The same holds true when it comes to immensely complicated municipal and school budgets that local officials craft annually.

But the recent reassessment and the numerous appeals that funneled through the courts earlier this year have left many townships, boroughs and cities in Washington County facing uncertainty – and huge financial holes – in their 2018 budgets they must pass before the end of the month.

South Strabane, Washington and North Franklin are just a few of the communities that have scrambled in recent weeks to fill gaping deficits caused not by fiscal irresponsibility, but by uncertainty. All of them cited losses in revenue from property tax appeals – especially from huge commercial properties that provide a windfall – that are leaving them hundreds of thousands of dollars in the red as money is being stripped out of their coffers.

“A pattern of revenue projections not coming to fruition in previous years has also had negative impacts to the township’s financial resources, which also necessitates a more conservative approach to projecting revenues,” South Strabane Township Manager Brandon Stanick wrote in his recommendation for a .25-mill tax increase the supervisors passed this year.

In North Franklin, the supervisors approved a .30-mill property tax increase to make up for losses created by the closing of Macy’s and an appeal that lowered the assessment for Washington Crown Center.

When these municipalities put their 2017 budgets together late last year, they expected a certain amount of revenue from the new reassessment. Although it was just a projection at the time, it was close enough to hit the target for their budgets to remain relatively revenue neutral since the state won’t allow windfall profits. But when the appeals this year unexpectedly cut out millions in reassessment figures, it left the municipalities with no choice but to raise taxes to fund their budgets.

None of this needed to happen. In fact, the solution to the problem was simple, but the opportunity has long since passed.

With the final property tax figures still in limbo last year, and with so many more appeals left to be decided, Washington County should have delayed implementation of the reassessed figures until next year.

That’s what Allegheny County did in its most recent court-ordered reassessment of 2011. Although that county was ordered to implement the figures in 2012, they were permitted instead to use them for their 2013 budgets after the Pittsburgh Public School System raised concerns that it would be impossible to set a correct millage rate with so many outstanding appeals waiting to be heard.

Unfortunately, that’s what happened in Washington County.

Now the municipalities must once again aim at that moving target that could still change as more appeals are expected next year. But, in the end, they’ll be fine.

It’s the property taxpayers who ultimately will pick up this unnecessary tab.