Mt. Lebanon to proceed with more property assessment appeals
Mt. Lebanon will appeal more residential property assessments in 2016.
Commissioners voted 3-2 on Feb. 9 to contract with Diversified Municipal Services Inc. of McCandless to represent the municipality in defending and appealing assessed values, including compiling sales data on the subject and comparable properties.
Kelly Fraasch, Dave Brumfield and Steve Silverman supported the measure, while John Bendel and Steve McLean voted against.
“I’ve supported this every year we’ve done it because, especially in Ward 4, what we find is that, taken as a larger group, lower-priced homes are hit more heavily by assessments,” Brumfield said about the ward he represents. “They’re closer to their actual fair-market value or above it, whereas higher-priced homes tend to significantly underassessed.”
Bendel and McLean expressed the opinion that governmental entities other than the municipality should address the relative value of assessments.
“The responsibility to do this clearly falls with Allegheny County and then empowered by the state of Pennsylvania,” Bendel explained. “I believe we’ve done the best we can to create a process that makes sense. The burden, in my view, still falls with the county to make sure they get the assessments correct.”
He and other commissioners agreed to send a letter to the county requesting that it conduct another reassessment, to “come up with better values that are appropriate and do that on a regular basis,” Bendel said.
Mt. Lebanon began appealing residential property assessments in 2013, following the latest countywide reassessment. During the first two years of the program, the municipality targeted properties that were sold during certain years, resulting in affected homeowners dubbing it a “newcomers’ tax.”
In 2015, the emphasis shifted to properties with assessed values of 50 percent or below the sale price, regardless of the year sold. Discussions about the 2016 program focused on raising that threshold to 55 percent.
For its services, Diversified will charge a flat fee of $175 for each appeal attended. The municipality has budgeted $25,000 for such purposes.