Apr 14, 2019 3 min read

If you graduated in 1973, chances are you became a voter and employed. This was about the time our legislators in Pennsylvania decided to make some tax changes. The main issue was to have the right tax to guarantee the right amount of revenue to support our school systems. The first suggestion proposed was to replace the school property tax and increase the sales tax or earned income tax. Sales tax would be supported by everyone spending within the state. Included in this scenario would be purchases for the young, old, disabled and retired. Also included would-be shoppers from out of state. The second suggestion was to increase the 1% tax on earnings and net profits. This would have resulted in working families (father, mother and adult children) to each pay double the earned income tax they currently pay while others with no income or profits, pay nothing, as today. Neither suggestion has moved to some conclusion except, election after election, candidates promise to eliminate the property tax by either of these suggestions, or both.

The property tax, to support our school’s education system, gives argument why property owners without the need for service from their local school district must continue to pay property tax until death. Further, the current tax is based on an assessed value of your dwelling and land. The tax law for assessing or reassessing provided no schedule but to reassess “when market values change” and, then, the “county commissioners must call for a reassessing of the full county.” The requirement has always been the commissioners so there should have been no reason that a court had to mandate reassessing Washington County.

Reassessing is costly and a general expense of the county  taxpayers). Here, in Washington County, we constantly are reminded, in the Observer-Reporter, the recent $8 million reassessment was caused by a petition by McGuffey and Washington school districts a few years ago and fought by many commissioners, not just the ones in office today. The commissioners basically ignored their legal duty to consider a reassessment. There is no argument that market values increased many times since the last reassessment for 1980. All taxing bodies that depend on property assessed values to be kept up-to-date, and fair, needs proper revenues as service costs rise.

If you are reaching retirement, you worked all those years since 1973, with a promise, dying in the hands of all legislators and governors for 46 years, that your home and land should not be responsible for support of the education system and changes were needed. Since our tax laws in Pennsylvania were adopted to fund services you receive, you have to question how some legislative body in the early ’50s decided to add another tax, the earned income tax on wages and net profits, as revenues for school districts, then added the state tax on the same incomes in support of the school systems and made no changes to the real estate tax, mainly to school districts. The word, “services,” needs to be more defined to make better sense in using all local taxes to fund the county, municipalities and school districts. There is no doubt, assessing or reassessing real estate can ever be perfect so how, legally, are our elected officials bound by the outdated real estate tax law to continue their current enactment of taxation?

Joann Diesel

Washington