Judge dismisses reassessment lawsuit
HOLLIDAYSBURG — A Blair County judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a citizens group that challenged the county’s reassessment project and its appeal process.
In a 71-page ruling distributed Monday, Judge Elizabeth Doyle recognized that Blair County Citizens for Accurate Reassessment has legal standing to raise reassessment issues on behalf of its members.
But in further rulings, the judge sided with Blair County and Evaluator Services & Technology, the Greensburg-based company hired to manage the county’s reassessment project. Together, they had asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit and direct citizens to resolve their complaints through the existing property appeals process.
On behalf of the 300-plus property owners who signed up as members of the BC-CAR, attorney Robert Donaldson said Monday that he will review each part of the judge’s ruling and evaluate appeal options.
Doyle, at the end of her lengthy ruling, found that the group had not presented “a substantial constitutional question” or “an adequate statutory remedy” that she could use to address their complaints about inaccurate property assessments or the frustrations they encountered during the appeal process.
“The Court has great sympathy for the litigants, especially the elderly, infirm and low-income people most affected by any change in circumstances resulting from the reassessment,” Doyle wrote. “But the court cannot base its legal determination on sympathy.”
Doyle also turned down the idea of addressing the citizen complaints by reinitiating the appeals process for BC-CAR members.
She said that speaks to a change in law, with complaints more appropriately directed to the legislative process.
The BC-CAR raised multiple issues in its complaint about Blair County’s reassessment project, which generated updated property values for the first time since 1958. In its lawsuit filed a year ago, the citizens group, on behalf of its members, challenged property assessments that were subsequently used for the first time this year to calculate county, school district and municipal property taxes.
Among its complaints, the citizens group told the judge that the county failed to help property owners who didn’t understand how to initiate or undertake the appeal process.
But attorneys for the county, Joan Righter Price and Janet Burkhardt, advised the judge of numerous public meetings held to educate property owners on the reassessment and took the position that the county went beyond meeting what’s required by law.
“While any program could have been enacted through the legislative process, the court cannot mandate requirements above and beyond the requirements of due process, no matter how sympathetic the cause,” Doyle said.
BC-CAR also took issue with the auxiliary appeal board members who, during reassessment, evaluated property values assigned by Evaluator Services and Technology, the company that managed the county’s reassessment project, trained the appeal board members, then worked with the board members during the appeal process.
When Blair County commissioners recruited people to serve on auxiliary boards to hear property appeals generated by reassessment, commissioners admitted to approaching people they knew and who they believed could render a fair decision. The people appointed did not have to have any qualifications in evaluating property values.
Doyle said her review of the law indicates that members of an auxiliary appeal board, by statute, “must be competent and qualified residents of the county.”
“The prior knowledge of property valuation of board members is not a due process requirement,” the judge said.
Mirror Staff Writer Kay Stephens is at 946-7456.