PA Supreme Court Backs School Districts Appealing Property Taxes

ICourt Upholds School District’s Ability to File Tax Assessment Appeals on Recently Sold, Underassessed Propertieslated the uniformity clause given its discriminatory impact.

Succinctly put, Donohue explains that the district first categorizes properties based on their newly purchased status. Next, the district further subdivides properties based on their sale price, appealing assessments only if they appear to be underassessed by at least $150,000. Thus, in Donohue’s eyes, the district’s policy creates an unconstitutional subclass of properties based on their sale prices, and he would reverse the Commonwealth Court’s ruling.

Finally, Justice Kevin Dougherty wrote a separate opinion in support of reversal of the Commonwealth Court’s ruling.

Dougherty similarly noted that the CLR does not represent uniformity, and the selection process identifies properties with the highest disparities between assessed and reassessed value. As such, Dougherty also believed that such a selection process violated the uniformity clause.

However, Dougherty went a step further than Donohue and concluded that frequent countywide assessments of properties in each taxing district could solve future dilemmas such as this one, stating that Pennsylvania is one of two states that lacks statutorily mandated reassessments on a fixed interval. As such, Dougherty urged the legislature to repeal its indefinite use scheme and instead enact a mandatory reassessment period every few years.

Contributors

Dylan Beltrami, a third-year law student at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, who is interning at the firm, assisted in the preparation of this article.

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