Maneuvering continued Friday regarding Allegheny County's new 2002 property reassessments, with a Democratic opponent calling on the board that certified the figures last week to consider rescinding them.
The administration of county Executive Jim Roddey, which wants 2002 values to remain in place, is preparing a plan to locate and to amend flawed home assessments by tracking down errors in how houses are described in the county's computer system - descriptions that helped to determine how new values were calculated. Overall, real estate values rose in the county by 11 percent from last year.
Homeowners outraged to see home values jumping up - some even after their reassessments were lowered on appeal to the county last year - have been bombarding county offices with irate telephone calls this week. More than 2,000 such calls have come into the county Office of Property Assessment since Wednesday.
Councilman Rick Schwartz - who Tuesday spearheaded a measure through council asking a common-pleas judge to freeze values at 2001 levels - said yesterday he wants the county Property Assessment Oversight Board to reconsider its acceptance of the new values Jan. 8. By a 2-1 vote, over Schwartz's objections, the board found the new values were created using industry-accepted formulas that met the county's new assessment ordinance.
Schwartz is City Council President James Simms' representative on the oversight board. The other two members -- George R. Whitmer, a senior vice president at PNC Bank, and Robert C. Stephenson, of Strategic Investment Fund -- are Roddey appointees. Neither Whitmer nor Stephenson could be reached for comment.
"Trying to fix this system on the fly is too complicated," Schwartz said. "It's like standing in the middle of a torrent."
Simms still is preparing a petition to Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick. He is asking Wettick to force the county to revert to 2001 reassessments, which would include more than 300,000 changes in assessments awarded by the county appeals board last year.
Councilman Ron Francis is one of two Republicans to vote against asking Wettick to repudiate the 2002 reassessments. He said the county should focus on "fixing the No. 1 problem" - homes improperly described in the county's real estate database. Each home is described by more than 200 factors, including age, size, number of rooms, condition, type of construction, the condition of the lot and amenities.
"Some of the data that we have in the system is not correct, and that is what is causing some of the reassessments not to be correct," Francis said.
The Roddey administration has been urging people to visit the county's real estate Web site to examine the descriptions of their home and to report any mistakes.
More detailed records - called property description cards - are available from the county Office of Property Assessment in Downtown.
Homeowners have been busy visiting the county's Web site to collect reassessment data. The site has received more than 1.8 million hits since reopening Tuesday, said Roddey spokeswoman Margaret Philbin.
"The overall assessment is better than the previous year, and 2001 was better than the year before," Francis said. "It took 20 to 30 years for the assessments to get this screwed up, and it's going to take two to three years to fix it."
| County employees available |
Allegheny County employees will be available Monday to answer questions regarding property assessments. Most government offices are closed in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
County officials decided to staff telephone centers because of the high number of calls received this week from irate homeowers.
For more information, call (412) 350-3646. Operators will be available from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
