The Reassessment is Coming for Allegheny County!

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Please rise, court is now in session. I strenuously object.A legal podcast brought to you by the Pittsburgh law firm of Flaherty Fardo isnow in session. All those seeking information about the law and legal mattersaffecting the people of Pittsburgh and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, half-baked opinions and a dose of self -indulgence are invited to attend andparticipate. I want the truth! You can't handle the truth! The defensestrenuously objects. You would!

Call the first witness. Hello and welcome to I StrenuouslyObject. Hopefully going to be a quick episode today. Thank you for joining me.I am Bill Rogel, a partner in the law firm, Flaherty, Fardo, Rogel and Amick. Iwill be joined today by the queen herself, Nicole Amick, to talk about what waspreviously breaking news, I guess is now just news, regarding the impending orthe threat of an impending property tax assessment.

you know, the present beware, the future beware, it'scoming. So we're just gonna move right on into that here today. Joining me asmentioned is Nicole. We have, you know, to give us a proper musical fanfare,it's a message from the queen, a message from the queen.

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That's copyrighted material, but that's okay. Good morning,Bill. I very much appreciate that introduction. And I ask that you do thatevery time I'm on the podcast moving forward. Well, that is a bold ask, but I'mhappy to bust out the pipes whenever necessary for, uh, for your pettyamusement. So look, let's start right here. We're gonna, we're gonna, we'llstructure the episode as one of our just, just answer the five questions. Justanswer the five questions. What's happening?

So the city of Pittsburgh, I think it was last week, filed alawsuit basically trying to force a reassessment in Allegheny County. It wasthe city of Pittsburgh school district. And what they're trying to do isbasically saying, Allegheny County, you need to reassess all of the propertiesin the county. And we can get into why, but that was just filed. So that's kindof the breaking news component. I know that previous to that, they were tryingto work with the new county executive, Sarah Nomorato.

to see if she would basically order a reassessment or dosomething to kind of push it along. They were not happy with how those talkswere going. And so they have officially filed litigation to kind of start theprocess of trying to force a reassessment in Allegheny County. Okay. So let'stalk about that just a little bit more. First of all, this isn't the first timethat litigation has been involved either in getting a reassessment generally inthis county or specifically kind of more recently litigation over our currentsystem.

I guess question the second, right, is how did we get here?So you're right. And you were going to talk a little bit more about the historyof how that happens. But in Allegheny County, we do not have regularreassessments. So unless someone forces one, basically, our current system justkind of lets everything move on status quo, which is obviously doesn't reallymake a lot of sense based on what we're seeing. But that is how Pennsylvaniadoes it. They kind of leave every county up to them.

their own devices basically. And right now we have a 2012base year. So until someone forces us to do a reassessment, those numbers justmove forward indefinitely with properties. The reason we're here now and whythe city of Pittsburgh School District is taking this kind of step to force areassessment is they're broke. The reason that they're broke is the past coupleof years ad nauseam, we've talked about the litigation on this podcast about

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issues with numbers that were reported, lowering of ratiosbeing used. And last year, the Office of Property Assessments allowed propertyowners, based on a large reduction of ratio, to file both 2022 and 2023property appeals in 2023. At the same time. The problem with that for the taxoffices is when reductions inevitably happen, they have to refund money thatthey don't have because that money is for a year that is already completed.

So when the city of Pittsburgh, which includes a lot ofoffice buildings, large value buildings, especially downtown, sees $10 millionreductions, $20 million reductions repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, they arebeing asked to refund money that they don't have because it's money that hasbasically already been spent for a past year. So they're really strugglingright now. They don't have any money, which the city of Pittsburgh schooldistrict solicitor is basically saying. And basically there's

Their solution to this problem is we need to start fromground zero. We need to start from the beginning, fix this problem, and force areassessment in Allegheny County. Without going into a long history lesson thatnobody needs or wants in this regard. The state of Pennsylvania andspecifically Allegheny County has authorized the use of a base year system,which is kind of a weird, let's freeze time, assess everyone's property today,and then we're just going to move forward as if your property is the same valuefor the rest of time as it is today.

And then we have this appeals process that in part is theway in which the system brings in new information and data and thenretranslates it back into the base here into that weird place that's frozen intime, right? And that's what we've been talking about with the CLR being setat. Nicole, what's the number? 54 .5%. Crazy low, as low as we've seen. And itbasically means that functionally, we're assuming that properties on averagehave almost doubled in value.

between 2012 and the present. So anyway, we have this baseyear system. There's no place in the statute or any specific triggeringmechanism where a new assessment has to happen when those things get out ofwhack. But over time, as you move further and further from the base year, thevalues get more and more askew from what they're even supposed to. This isassuming you assess things correctly when you do the reassessment, which we'lltalk about momentarily. But even assuming you assess everyone's property withlike perfect 100 % accuracy in 2012,

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Those numbers are going to go all over the board. Some aregoing to go up, some are going to go down. People are going to build newhouses. All sorts of things are going to happen and the values are going to getfurther and further away from what in this kind of legal land of make believewe're pretending the assessed value is. And so, look, reassessments are superunpopular. Politicians never want to ask for them. It's why the last several,your last couple reassessments anyway have had to be triggered by litigation.We're only doing this when the court makes us.

We all kind of know it needs to happen, but no one wants tobe the one to make the decision and be politically responsible for thedecision. And desperate times financially have forced the, you know, the cityof Pittsburgh school district to, to be the one to kind of take that step outthere and say, okay, we're going to be the ones to force this because we've gotreal budgetary problems because we have to refund all this money. I think a lotof that has to do with a misconception of what a reassessment means.

to property owners. And so property owners hear reassessmentand it's like scary because people think, oh, all of our taxes are going up.Everyone's taxes are going up. And that's just not what that means. That's notwhat would actually happen. That's not how it works. That's not how any of thisworks. So we'll get into it. But I know you were going to talk a little bitmore about the actual litigation that's going on. Yeah. So, I mean, I took thechance to review the complaint. The thing to remember the previous case.

that ordered the reassessment was a case of the leadplaintiff was named Clifton. So it's the Clifton case. I believe it's Clifton vAllegheny County. I don't remember who's the named defendant. There were abunch of other plaintiffs, a group of property owners all got together andfiled suit together, challenging the constitutionality of the base year system.Now this suit was filed only three years after that reassessment. So yeah, thereassessment came into effect in 2002. In 2005, this Clifton lawsuit was filedsaying,

Look, you're violating the uniformity clause by having abase year at all. If you don't reassess every year, it's unconstitutionalbecause you're treating people whose properties have appreciated in value andpeople whose properties have depreciated in value. You're treating them thesame, like they've all moved together and that is unfair to the individualowners. The trial court sided with that initially. Said, yeah, that's right.The whole base year system is unconstitutional. That...

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It took two years to get to that decision, right? So 05, thesuit is filed, 07, the trial court says, yes, base year is unconstitutional.They start ordering the county to do these computer reassessments, whichhappened twice during the intervening period that never took effect, but hadthem kind of kicking the tires on a system that they would eventually use.Anyway, that got appealed up. The state Supreme court ultimately decided thebase year is not unconstitutional. But when, as applied, the base year systemis creating sufficient...

statistically demonstrable disparities and unfairness in thesystem, then a reassessment becomes constitutionally mandatory. So they didn'tthrow out all the base year systems all over the state in this county or otherplaces. They just said, look at your actual results. And if your county is tooout of line, you have to do a reassessment. And it's interesting. This is athing that doesn't seem intuitive to me, right? But there's an organizationcalled the International Association of Assessment Officers.

right, the IAAO. You wouldn't think that a coalitionnationally or internationally of people who are involved in basically thegovernment act of reassessing or assessing properties would have some sort ofprofessional organization like this, but they do. And the IAAO carries a lot ofweight specifically in the Clifton decision, right? They're saying, look, thereare broadly recognized beyond just this county or this state statisticalmeasures.

It's called the COD, the coefficient of disbursement. I haveto look at it. It's called the COD. It stands for something and the C iscoefficient. And it's a statistical measure for how much disparity within likeproperties your assessment system has in place. And the Clifton case basicallylooks at the numbers that were in place in Allegheny County and says, hey,look, when they get these high, it's unconstitutional. So looking at thecurrent litigation,

The hope is it can move faster because it's specificallyaddressed to what's in Clifton, by which I mean they do this math and say,here's what the COD is currently. It's like, you know, 20 % or whatever thenumber is. It's too high and pursuant to Clifton, it's really obvious you needa reassessment here. Interesting to note, the other thing that the complaintthat the school district file does is, well, one, it has a professional reportat the end.

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attached to the complaint. In that professional report, oneof the things it takes issue with is treating different types of property thesame. And by different types, I mean commercial versus residential or whatever,right, in particular. By law, under the Constitution, right, in Pennsylvania,you cannot, you're not allowed to tax commercial properties and residentialproperties differently. I suspect, although I don't know what every other statedoes, that most other taxing jurisdictions, and so the IAAO itself,

generally wants to treat these different types of propertydifferently for the purposes of assessing them. That's off the table inAllegheny County in this state. No one's allowed to do that. It helps pushthings out of line, but it leads to the focus in this complaint on what theheck is gonna go on and what has been going on with property tax appeals andthe assessments of specifically like large, you know, multi -million dollar.

you know, downtown skyscrapers and like these big commercialproperties that have huge vacancy rates, right? And what they do is they, theycan file an appeal, they can look at their current vacancy rates and the waythat the, the office space, the commercial office space market has changed postCOVID and whatever else to get a new professional assessment of their propertybased on an income approach, how much money they can actually generate from theactual tenants they're able to get. And so the example that they put withhypothetical numbers in this complaint is imagine a property, you know,

like a downtown commercial office building that sells for$20 million in 2012 and is assessed at $20 million. Fast forward to today,they've got a pretty big vacancy rate. They have someone come in and assess anddo a, you know, an economic assessment using the income value of appraisal ofwhat the value of that property is. And they say, okay, this property today isactually only worth $16 million or $18 million. But that's not the end of it.

When you file the appeal and you say, hey, this is now worth16 or $18 million today, then the next thing that happens is that 53 % CLR isapplied to that figure. And the property is cut in value to, you know, like $10million. And that happens because based on the CLR, we're assuming that theproperty values have been, have basically doubled overall. But that CLR, thatdoubling, that figure is based basically on residential properties.

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Right, the residential sales that are submitted by thecounty to the step, that's where that number comes from. And it doesn't reflectthe fact that across the board in commercial properties, you're not seeing adoubling 2012 versus today, not with vacancy rates, what they are. So thecommercial properties get to take advantage of the largely residential CLRpercentage, apply that to itself. And now that we're living in a land where aproperty that was purchased in the base year.

for $20 million is now being assessed at potentially halfthat. And the implications for the city and the city schools and all of the,everyone who budgets, but especially places where there's large commercialoffice buildings is significant, right? That's a $10 million reduction inassessment. That's half the property taxes that are going out the door. And insome cases having to be refunded and repaid. So all of which is, I thought itwas interesting that the actual complaint in addition to addressing,

the IAO statistical measures here to assess whether or notthere's enough, whether there's too much disparity in the taxes, made a veryclear point of talking about and arguing about both the kind of fairness andthe kind of impending economic disaster coming when the city itself is dealingwith what's going to happen with commercial property values and applying thisCLR to those values.

Yeah, and I think we've we've touched on it a couple times.And this is something that I've basically been predicting for like more than ayear, I'd say of the city is the one that's driving the bus right now. Butother tax entities across the county are also starting to deal with this issue.Because even if you look at the 54 .5 % for this year, not all houses haveappreciated since 2012 by that extent.

So what I have for this year, for example, a lot of myclients for 2024 are people who, you know, some of them are people thatrecently in the past couple of years have bought a property and they'reassessed at like 90 % of what they just bought a property for. So that'sclearly wrong. You know, properties aren't taken care of. Certain markets don'tappreciate to that extent. So it's kind of wonky all over the place, but again,the

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the issue that a lot of these other tax offices are nowstarting to see as the decisions from last year have finally now almostcompletely come out is they are also having to refund all this money and theywill continue having to do so moving forward. So, you know, we have largerresidential's where we're seeing, you know, five figure refunds. So it's acrossthe board. I think the city is the one that that kind of again is driving thebus just because they have like the largest properties that have seen thelargest reductions. But.

All the other tax offices, I think, are kind of piggybackingoff of them to say like, yeah, you do it, but like, we agree with you type ofthing, because everyone's kind of in the same boat and property owners aregoing to start feeling that as well. When they get their bills later this year,when the school district and local bills basically everywhere across thecounty, everyone's bills are basically going to be higher because all themillage rates are starting to come up. So it's a problem that.

If we had regular reassessments wouldn't happen, but becausewe don't do that and we've now let so long happen between the 2012 reassessmentand today, it's kind of like the SHIT is hitting the fan a little bit. And Ithink, again, the city is the one that had to kind of move forward based on thefact that they don't have any money. But everyone else that I've spoken with onthe school district side is like, yeah, like times are getting kind of tough.We're getting pretty lean here. So we really need something to happen soonerthan.

You spelled a thing in there. I mean, I have Bill, I havelittle kids, so I'm not allowed to swear. All you got to say is earmuffs andyou can say whatever you want. OK, OK. Sorry. Moving forward. Apologies. I'mused to having to edit myself. I should start. I have definitely heard Helennot quite repeating correctly the thing I say, but getting close. Well, now,now Cooper, my five year old, can spell. So now we're running into a wholeother problem where like he's trying to sound out what I'm spelling. And I'mlike, OK, I guess I don't know. I got to.

figure something else out. It sounds like these I wish Iwere more competent, you know, not fluent, but just more competent in thesecond language, right? Yes, right. I swear in that language. Then even if thekid starts repeating that elsewhere, other people are saying that, you know,they're right. It's not as bad. All right. Well, we, I guess we started thisone to ask, ask five and or three questions. Let me ask that third questionnow. What does an actual reassessment mean? What do we expect here?

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So the 2012 reassessment, which I was practicing in thisarea, so I was on the front lines of what happened then, it was kind of a messbecause when you have so long between reassessments, things come in all overthe place. And a lot of the values that came in at that point were really high.So I think between, the numbers came out at the beginning of 2012, and I thinkthere was more than 100 ,000 appeals that were filed in that year.

So that just shows you that's one sixth of the propertiesthat exist here. So that's a lot of appeals in any given year ranges betweenlike 10 to 20 ,000. So that's a huge increase off of what's normal. And thattook many years to kind of work its way through the system. I think thathopefully they've learned a little bit of a lesson in terms of that. I look toBeaver County, Beaver County just did a reassessment I think in the past year.

And though we don't really practice in Beaver County, I haveseen a lot of those numbers and spoken with people who are more familiar withthat. Beaver County used Tyler Technologies, which is who Allegheny County usedlast time to do their reassessment. And the numbers came in low. So it avoideda lot of these appeals being filed. And I would think that that might besomething that Allegheny County would be hoping for just to avoid 100 ,000appeals being filed again. Let me jump in a little bit and try to be, I think,as clear as we can here.

First of all, unless the state, like the entire state, thestate legislature steps in and mandates something else, totally changes theproperty taxes. Unless that happens, I'm pretty confident this case will resultin a reassessment, right? That's how reassessments happen in Allegheny County.The last time it was like a half dozen individual property owners. This timeit's a big taxing body, right? So it represents a much more significant subsetof the whole county.

But all it takes is one case to get in front of a court tohave a judge look at it and say, yep, this system is too out of whack. We haveto start over with a new reassessment. It's how it happened the last two times.It's how it will happen this time. The last time, as I had mentioned before,right, the suit was filed in 05. The state Supreme Court didn't end up rulinguntil 09. And then even from 09, when the state Supreme Court ruled, the actualreassessment by the time they hired someone, ran the numbers.

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vetted the numbers, got it in place. The actual reassessmentdoesn't happen until, and the base year isn't set until 2012. Now that's stillthe base year today. But you went from 05 when that suit was filed until 2012before there was actually rubber meets the road reassessments. Now I think thelitigation process will likely be quicker this time because, you know.

It's following four square right in the footsteps ofClifton, which means that unless someone wants to disturb that precedent, thatwill be enough to trigger the reassessment early. You may not get the, youknow, the five years at the beginning, but still it's going to take some time,right? This reassessment is coming, but this reassessment is not happeningtomorrow. And Nicole, I thought it was interesting. You mentioned a, like athird party contractor, a private contractor, and that's how this worked thelast time in Allegheny County. And that's how a lot of these reassessments workis basically they hire outside firms to come in.

do the work and then after they do the work, they publishand give notice to each property owner and taxing body of what they think thenew value is for that property. So let's say eventually there is areassessment. It's probably a couple years away. Nicole, what does thatactually mean to the property owners? I remember last time that this happenedin 2012. It's basically every property owner in the county will receive a pieceof mail from Allegheny County saying,

this is your new assessment value. Something to that effect.I don't know exactly how it will look, but every single property in the countywill have a new assessment value. And what that new assessment value issupposed to represent is however long it takes. So say we're in 2026, 2027,2028, whatever year that is, it will be the number that theoretically yourproperty is worth at that time. So again, this could be years out, but whateverthe current market value of your property is at that time.

So basically, unless you're in an office building situationor another kind of depressed market area of properties, for most residentialproperties, I would think that that number will be higher than what yourcurrent assessment value is, because presumably your property has appreciatedto some extent from 2012. So you'll get that piece of mail saying this is yournew assessment value. And that's when people start to panic, because they seethis number that's higher, and they think, oh my gosh, this is double what my

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previous number was my taxes are doubling. That right thereis why people get very nervous about reassessment. Why you said before, Bill,it's not a popular thing for politicians to ask for. So while the sticker shockof it may be something property owners need to keep in mind that when all thesenumbers go up, because that's going to happen across the county, I don't careif the buildings in downtown have depreciated, the rest of the county has goneup significantly since 2012. So that

base number is going to be higher than what it was. And taxoffices can't just say, yay for us, we now have double the amount of money. Sothey can't do that. So there's an anti -windfall statute in Pennsylvania thatbasically says, say I live in Mount Lebanon. So say the Mount Lebanon values goup 70 % from what they were before. Mount Lebanon can't then see an increaseand realize an increase of 70 % of tax base. What they have to do then is then

adjust the millage rate down. So while numbers ofassessments are going to go up, millage rates will come down. And what thatmeans is the numbers might actually be, while my assessment on my house mightbe higher, that doesn't mean my taxes are higher. My taxes could end up beinglower. So a lot of that is unknown at this time. Obviously, we don't know whatthose numbers will be, but it's something that I've been telling people becausea lot of

former clients have been reaching out to me and saying, hey,what can I do? Is there something I should be doing? There's nothing you cando. A reassessment, whenever it happens, is going to impact everybody. But it'sjust to avoid the panic of seeing a higher number and immediately thinking mytaxes are going to double or triple in some cases from what they were. OK, it'shappening. Everybody stay calm. What's the procedure, everyone? What's theprocedure? Stay f***ing calm. Because once the numbers come out and the taxoffices look at those, we're going to see a mass reduction.

of millage rates. So they typically say that when areassessment happens, one third of property owners see a reduction in taxes,one third of property owners see their taxes stay approximately the same, andthen one third of property owners do see an increase to their taxes. So it'snot some like mass everyone's taxes are going up situation, though that willhappen in some cases. It's more of a, okay, let's wait to see where thesenumbers come in at, and then people will have the opportunity to appeal thosenew numbers once they do come out.

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Yeah, let me let me let me walk a little bit of panic backinto your narrative here. Panic now, I repeat panic now. You're right. Thereare these anti -windfall provisions in place and they're supposed to beapproximately revenue neutral by law when they do these reassessments. So, yes,if the whole area goes up 70 percent, the taxing body isn't going to get torealize a 70 percent increase in their actual revenue.

The people who are going to get hardest are the people whohaven't had their property reassessed in a long time, right? If you're one ofthe people who right now is benefiting from the fact that your property isprobably worth double what it was back in 2012, where you're getting taxed onit like it's still 2012. However, those numbers shake out, you're probablygoing to end up facing a pretty significant increase if they properly assessyour value next time. Would you say it's time for everyone to panic? Yes, Iwould, Kent. Yes, panic.

You are correct. There are two things to think about.There's both the assessed value and the millage rate, right? And they both aregoing to move. It's not just the assessed value that's going to move in areassessment. There's also going to be the adjustment of the millage rate. Andyou don't know the full tax implications until you know both parts of thatequation. But there will certainly be some people who are getting hit prettyhard because they have managed to escape their property being increased overthe course of the years. And the other thing I don't know how it's going toshake out is,

the same problem with the diminishing values and the vacancyrates and the problems with commercial real estate. I don't know what thereassessment is going to do when it reassesses those properties or what theappeals on those properties are gonna look like when they're doing that. If itturns out that there are significant diminutions in the value of commercialreal estate in your school district or your municipality.

that may well be enough of an offset when that reassessmentcomes in that the residential properties do end up facing a significantincrease. Again, because we're not allowed to treat commercial properties andresidential properties differently. They do not have the option, the taxingbodies to say, okay, our commercial real estate has decreased in value by 50%.So let's increase the rate on the commercial properties to balance that out.They're gonna have to take that money from the residential property ownersinstead. So there are certainly,

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things to be concerned about as this reassessment shakesout, both because your individual reassessment may be bad, right? They may justovervalue your property or because as they reevaluate everyone's propertyvalue, you may be facing a kind of a higher millage rate or a higher kind oftax burden being pushed off onto residential property owners than the system,you know, the last 10, 20, 30 years has been designed for. Yeah. So I had twothoughts to that. I think.

The people that are going to benefit the most from areassessment are the people, as you said, Bill, that most recently have gonethrough some type of school district initiated appeal in the past like fiveyears. So for example, I bought my house in 2020. My purchase price is what itis. There's only so much I can do to try to mitigate that increase. But when areval happens in my area, all those people that have lived in their houses for30 years that have been benefiting from the lower tax base, they're going to bebrought up to where I'm at. So I'm actually expecting my house.

to go down whenever a reassessment happens, just because ofwhen I bought my property and because the property values have gone up so muchin my area since 2012. So there will certainly be a lot of people in that boat.But then the flip side of that is like what you were saying, for example, inthe city where they're going to have to include some consideration of the factthat office buildings, for example, do not have the value now that they hadpreviously. So that's going to have to factor in, you would think, to any newvalue.

And then we have areas in the city like Lawrenceville, SouthSide, things like that where you look at Lawrenceville streets, then you lookat those old row houses, some people will have an assessment, an assessmentvalue of like $40 ,000. So their taxes per year are about $1 ,000 total. Andthe people up the street from them, which on paper have a renovated house, butthe same, their houses will be assessed at 400 ,000. So their taxes per yearare $10 ,000.

Now what's going to happen to the person that's lived intheir house for a long time that's assessed at $40 ,000 is they're going tocome up. And I mean, that's going to negatively impact some people, people thatare on a fixed income. There's a lot of other problems that kind of come intothat, but there's no way that property is worth $40 ,000. And it's just not arealistic viewing of that property. Now, if that's like some old lady on socialsecurity, that's a problem because she's not going to be able to afford it fortaxes quadruple from where they were before. So.

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I think that's part of the reason that Sarah and Amaradodidn't want to kind of dip her toe into this pool because if she's the one thatsays, fine, let's do it. And then, you know, all these people have theseproblems where, yes, clearly their property is undervalued right now, but theimpact to them is going to be so significant that some of these people may haveto sell their houses. There's a lot of kind of underlying issues that comealong with these revails. And I know that when she was talking before theelection of protections for senior citizens, protections for

first -time property owners. There was all sorts of thingsthat she was talking that could help protect people from that situation wherethey have to sell their house. But that's hopefully something like that willhappen when a reval happens, but it's a very complicated issue. There's so manydifferent parts of it. And while I can sit here and say like, yes, thatproperty should go up in value because clearly that's wrong. And if someonewere to sell that property, they'd sell it for way, way more than that. Theactual daily impact on someone I think would be really significant.

I guess maybe we'll just close with this, right? If it wereas simple at, look, yes, this lawsuit has been filed asking for a reassessmentand yes, it's going to end up one way or another in a reassessment, right? Andif it were just as simple as pushing the reassessment button and everythingelse kind of handled itself, it would clearly be justified under the fact andthe kind of current inequalities and disparities in our system. And thereshould be a reassessment, whatever that means. But boy, there's a lot of workin the details for.

how one goes about actually doing the assessment, the timingof the assessment, how you're valuing commercial properties, how you're valuingresidential properties, what the processes are to protect people from massive,immediate, shocking increases that force people to sell their homes. There's alot of details in how to carry out a reassessment in a way that minimizes thesegiant disruptions, doesn't just backdory in a tax increase.

Luckily, there are years, literally years, for the courts,the county, the taxing bodies to kind of work out what that reassessment'sgonna be. To be fair, there have already been years for them to do that, and wehaven't made a lot of progress with it. But they're kind of under the gun now,right? At some point, even if, you know, last time it took, you know, thebetter part of a decade to get there, there is kind of a, you know, a light atthe end of the tunnel. That light might be a train.

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But one way or another, that lights coming and everyone'sgoing to have to start moving from opposing the idea of a reassessment to whatdo we have to make an actual reassessment look like to be fair and palatableand minimize, you know, the worst consequences of that. Yeah. And my finalthought is I'm wondering that, as you said, I think that this whole process isvery convoluted. I think it will take a long time. I don't know.

that the city of Pittsburgh School District is gonna havelike a clear opponent that's saying, no, we don't need one because like, whocan even take that position at this point? But I'll be interested to see ifanyone, whether that be the courts or the government or someone says, hey guys,let's stop doing it this way. Why don't we just say every year we're gonna havean incremental increase, which is what a lot of other states do, or every threeyears we're just gonna have automatic new values.

Pennsylvania is the only state in the country that does itthis way, that does it this like weird, wild, wild west, everyone choose howyou want to do it. You know, some counties have a 1950 base year. It's a whole,none of it really makes a lot of sense to anyone, but it's one of those thingsthat it's, you know, this is how we do it. So it's just the status quo, butclearly it's not working. It's not going to work moving forward because even ifwe do a reassessment in 2026 or 2028,

Okay, well, what happens after that? Are we just gonna endup here again in 15 years? So I'll be interested to see if there's any kind ofmore permanent solution that gets put into place by anybody to say, look, yes,we need a reassessment. And then after that, here's what we're gonna do toavoid just doing this all over again ad nauseum indefinitely moving forwardforever. So we'll see. Yeah. The only thing I'd add to that, Nicole, before Ilet you go, if, as we've seen in the past, it can take...

years indeed, you know, five, six, seven years, sometimes toget to an actual reassessment. In the interim, while we know the reassessment'scoming, but we still have the current system, people should not neglect theirproperty tax assessments in the short term, property tax appeals in the shortterm. Yes, the number that you get set if you appeal and get your propertyreassessed, you know, this year or next year, you know, maybe that gets...

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kind of circumvented by reassessment three or four or fiveyears down the road. But that reassessment isn't coming tomorrow.

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You cannot just wait and figure out the reassessment willtake care of my property tax assessment problems. It might, but you know,there's a chance to save some money in the short term. So take advantage of it.Thanks once again for joining us on this episode of I Strenuously Object.Please subscribe, rate and review the podcast. Tell your friends to check usout. If you have any questions for the podcast, for our mailing it in segmentor any other feedback, you can email us at iobject.

at pghfirm .com. We are on Instagram at I strenuously object podcast for more information on property tax assessments and appeals pendingreassessment information, medical malpractice, personal injury, or any legal matters whatsoever. Visit our website at pghfirm .com. That's when I say ourwebsite, that's Flaherty Fardo, Rogel and Amick, two fourths of whom you heard from here today. So thanks again for joining us and until next time, someparty.

I got 40 strangers out in my living room and all I want todo is get some sleep I don't know why you got to do it in front of the kid with the effin. All you gotta do is say earmuffs to him earmuffs.  likewhatever you want. Okay. I'm just proving a point. You don't have to celebrateFrank.

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