Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato yesterday told County Council that he will stop the court-ordered reassessment of property values in the county — to be completed in 2012 — from taking effect if he is elected governor of Pennsylvania.
“I will do everything in my power to make sure that it doesn’t happen,” said Mr. Onorato, in the first of four appearances he is required to make at council meetings every year.
Mr. Onorato, who is one of five candidates seeking the Democratic Party nomination in the gubernatorial race, said “a property reassessment is the worst thing that can happen in this county at this time.”
After months of resisting a judge’s attempt to implement a reassessment timeline last year, Mr. Onorato said he only complied with a court order to start the process of reassessing the value of the 570,000 or so properties in the county, “because my staff had to convince me there was nothing left to do.”
There was nothing left to do in the way of a legal fight to stop a reassessment, he said, “except that [Common Pleas Judge R. Stanton Wettick Jr.] would have thrown me in jail for contempt of court.”
In December, Judge Wettick accepted a county plan to complete a reassessment of all property in the county for implementation in 2012.
That plan will start with the county sending mailers to all property owners in the next few weeks, requesting that they verify the data characteristics of their properties. That data will be used to edit and clarify the county’s existing database on the characteristics of all real estate in the county.
Next, the county will hire a contractor by the end of April to start a parcel-by-parcel review and analysis of approximately 395,000 properties. That process should end by mid-2011.
According to the county, a parcel-by-parcel review was done on 175,000 properties during the 2005 reassessment, which was not certified because Mr. Onorato threw it out on grounds that property taxes would have been increased an average of 19 percent. The properties reviewed in 2005 will not see a parcel-by-parcel inspection in this round.
Read the full Post-Gazette article here
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