The envelope please…
Consultant Robert Neil, former Washington County chief assessor, stands next to a Washington County reassessment project sign in the Chapman Building in Washington last week.
Donald Barrett installs computers for the Washington County reassessment project in the Chapman Building in Washington on Tuesday.
When a household or business is inundated with junk mail, it can be easy to overlook something important.
Those monitoring the daily mail will want to keep an eye open next month for an envelope containing a vital piece of information: Washington County’s new property assessments.
“They’re not a tax bill,” stressed Bradley Boni, Washington County chief assessor. As property owners read their new assessments, he’d like them to ask themselves, “Is this what I would sell my property for?”
The first countywide reassessment in 35 years began in fall 2013 and finished up last summer. Tyler Technologies Inc. was awarded a $6.9 million contract by the county for reassessments and will provide information to owners of 121,000 properties on what their spread was worth as of July 1, 2015.
For the past 35 years, property assessments in Washington County have been based on 25 percent of fair market value as of Jan. 1, 1981. They will now be based on 100 percent of fair market value as of July 1, 2015.
Residential property owners will be the first to get the mailings around March 10.
“We’ll start sending them out in March, probably in four batches,” said Wesley Graham, Washington County project supervisor for Tyler Technologies. “Each week, we’ll send out a batch. The last batch will be commercial property owners’ new values.”
Washington County has approximately 120,000 parcels of land, about 80,000 of which are residential.
The phone will inevitably start ringing at Tyler’s local phone number, 724-228-5019, as soon as postal carriers deliver the new assessments, and people will inevitably want to make changes that will result in a lower figure. Although Tyler stresses that it does not set tax rates, school districts, municipalities and county budgets derive the bulk of their budgets from property tax revenue based on the amount of revenue they expect from property assessments.
County government, Boni said at a recent meeting in Peters Township, is not planning to collect additional revenue and he expects the county tax levy, currently at 24.9 mills, to drop to between 3 and 4 mills in 2017.
So that property owners could take a preliminary look at the information Tyler gathered, the firm, beginning in 2014, sent out what are known as “data mailers” once data collection was completed in a municipality. The data mailers asked that property owners review them, correct any errors and send the information back to Tyler’s office in Arden.
Data mailers were sent out with different return dates.
“We don’t have a drop-dead date,” Graham said. “People can still send in a data mailer.”
Tyler sought information on square feet of living area, features such as number of fireplaces and bathrooms, construction quality and a building’s age.
To make changes in the database, people who have received their new assessments in the mail can make an appointment to meet with a Tyler representative at the Chapman Building, 351 W. Beau St., Washington.
Also included in each envelope will be a map showing the location of the Chapman Building – plus its photograph – to help people find their way to the informal reviews. Officials have even thought about stationing a greeter at the designated entrance to make sure people can find their way to the waiting and hearing rooms.
To iron out errors in data or to lower an assessment, the property owner is going to have to show proof.
“Photos and information, that’s good enough for us,” Graham said. “If the property owner takes photos of a problem with the interior of the home, they don’t need an appraisal to come in to see us.”
Buckling foundation walls are an example of a flaw that could result in a lower assessment. Another might be what assessors call “catastrophic loss” attributed to fire, storms or flooding that occurred since a Tyler representative visited the premises, resulting in abandonment of a building.
The informal reviews are expected to take place in March, April and May.
Beginning June 1, the formal appeal process begins and property owners hoping to change their assessments will have to deal with the Washington County Assessment Office, not Tyler Technologies.
“That’s when the process will begin for the county,” Graham said.
Aug. 10 is the final date to file a formal appeal.
The commissioners reappointed the three members of the county’s board of assessment appeals – John Rheel, Bill West and L. Anthony Spossey – earlier this month, but this trio will be unable to handle the avalanche of appeals that are expected to follow a reassessment. Commission Chairman Larry Maggi said members of additional boards will be appointed in the future, but he didn’t have a specific timeline.
Washington County Recorder of Deeds Debbie Bardella, a Speers resident who is also in charge of the county tax revenue department, said county commissioners can appoint up to four additional three-person boards, plus substitutes, all of whom will have to be trained before they can hear assessment appeals.
Formal appeals are to be heard by the various boards by Oct. 31, and property values are to be certified by Nov. 15.
Washington County does not generally appeal its own property assessments, but school districts and municipalities can appeal an assessment they think is too low.
Bardella was an employee in the recorder’s office when the county completed its last reassessment in 1981. Information that was then transmitted manually from the recorder’s to the tax assessment office 35 years ago is now being transferred overnight from a computer system to Tyler’s software system known as “iasWorld.”
“Back then, it was more paper-shuffling than computers,” said Robert Neil of Fallowfield Township, former Washington County chief assessor whose 42-year career has centered on valuation of property.
Property reassessment is an unfamiliar process for anyone who moved to Washington County after the last reassessment in 1981.
At the meeting in Peters Township, one man in the audience complained, “I feel that we’re getting railroaded.”
Up to this point, photographs of individual properties in Washington County on the county’s website have not been views from the street, but aerial photos taken in 2014 upon which parcel numbers have been superimposed.
Expect this to change. Get ready for closeups of your home, lot or business on the Internet.
As the new assessments are being mailed, the county expects to have a plethora of information about each property on the tax assessment department’s website.
“Picture, sketch, attributes, etc. will become available as the first wave of notices of new value go out in March,” wrote Washington County Chief Assessor Bradley Boni, in response to an email. He declined to give a firm date for the rollout of the website, www.co.washington.pa.us/reassessment. The address has been active for some time, but until the photos are added, it contains just three links: frequently asked questions, downloadable documents and a video titled, “Why do we need a reassessment?”
“We know that the website will be up and running in conjunction with the first March mailings,” he wrote. The public access site won’t be available until the first wave of notices go out, and property data will only become available online as batches of mailings go out. In other words, if your notice of new value isn’t in the first batch of mailings, your property data will also not be available online until your mailer goes out.”
Several people who attended the reassessment meeting at Peters Township Middle School were unhappy to find out that photographs of their homes will be displayed on a county website.
“The only information I am going to publish is what is publicly available,” Boni responded.
Anyone who has never typed his or her address into a computer search engine may be surprised at the amount of information – correct or incorrect – that’s already available online. With the rise of the Internet, compiling real estate data online became a money-making proposition and perhaps the best-known example is zillow.com.
For the new Washington County website, “Information on how to access the website will come with the new assessment when it is mailed,” Neil said.
When Tyler had a contract with Allegheny County to reassess a few years ago, many Washington County residents recall the volume of complaints registered there.
“Were there mistakes made,” Graham asked at the meeting in Peters. “Yes. There will be mistakes made. We didn’t knock on every door in Allegheny County or measure every house, which we did here. We feel we did a good job with the information that we had in Allegheny County.”
After the meeting, one Peters resident who declined to give his name but said his family has lived in the township for four generations, commented about Tyler Technologies, “It’s a very narrow scope what they do. A lot of people see them as the enemy. They may be underassessed and they’re rightfully concerned because they may be seeing an increase.
“This may not be a popular opinion, but there’s a disparity between people moving in and building $1 million McMansions and farms. It’s still a great place to live. There’s a lot of emotion here because there’s a lot at stake. People feel victimized and it’s understandable. Change is difficult for everyone, especially people who are older and settled.”
In what may be a bewildering process, people may wonder if they need an appraisal of their property. Graham said they’re not required for informal reviews.
Scott York, owner of York Realty, Washington, a certified general appraiser since the state began certifying in that field in 1990, posted on Facebook last month he expects a “run” on appraisals once people have their new values in hand, and, because of the demand, he expects the price of an appraisal to double or triple.
“I have legal authority to appraise everything from the doghouse to the dog track,” said York, who has since prepared 30 reports, which he described as “prepaid and ready to go,” each of which he described as a benchmark that will answer the question, “Is this worth appealing or not?”
The ranks of “commercial appraisers are pretty thin,” he said, noting there are 1,352 in Pennsylvania who can place a value on residential buildings with more than four units, commercial and industrial property. According to RealStats, the average sale price of a home in Washington County last year was $164,275.
While the reassessment will likely be taking center stage, real estate will continue to be bought and sold and many of those transfers in the backdrop will also be candidates for appraisal. According to York’s database, 3,594 properties changed hands in Washington County in 2015. Not all required an appraisal because some transactions were cash deals and others had private financing rather than a bank or mortgage company loan.
A property owner may wonder where he or she stands, and an appraisal is one route to determine that.
“If Tyler comes in equal or lower, there’s no sense fighting about it,” York said.
Reassessment in Washington County has been in the news since 2008 when the McGuffey and Washington school districts filed suit in Washington County Court, but once the letters start arriving in March, a new phase begins as a countywide issue converts to an individual issue affecting each county property owner.
“A lot has happened behind the scenes,” Neil said. “The rubber’s going to hit the road now.”