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Lackawanna County set to begin appeal process for new assessed property values

The Lackawanna County Government Center, 123 Wyoming Ave., Scranton, Pa.
Aimee Dilger
/
WVIA News
The Lackawanna County Government Center, 123 Wyoming Ave., Scranton, Pa.

Lackawanna County plans to post forms on its website Friday so home, business and farm owners can appeal the new assessed values of their properties.

County assessment director Patrick Tobin said real-estate owners will have until Aug. 1 to appeal values calculated during the county’s first reassessment in more than 50 years.

The first appeal hearings will begin Aug. 4, and appeals should be completed by Oct. 31, Halloween, Tobin said.

The county will also post new assessed values for all properties online Friday so people can review them for appeal purposes, he said.

The hearings will take place in a storefront next to the Electric City Aquarium & Reptile Den. The aquarium is on the first floor of the Marketplace at Steamtown. Parking in the marketplace garage will be free with a county validation.

“We scouted a bunch of locations, and this is actually the best one,” county chief of staff Brian Jeffers said in a statement.

Filing an appeal will cost $35 per parcel and people appealing must include an up-to-date photo of properties.

Multiple boards to hear appeals

Five three-member assessment appeal panels will preside at the hearings. People dissatisfied with panel decisions may appeal to the county court of common pleas.

The appeal hearings mark the county’s last major step before imposing new property values countywide on Jan. 1 for the first time since 1968.

The county, school districts, cities, boroughs and townships will use the new values to calculate new property tax rates by the end of the year.

Thousands expected to appeal

Tobin said he doesn’t know if the number of appeals will exceed the number of informal reviews of new assessments. The informal reviews took place the last two months.

Tyler Technologies Inc., of Plano, Texas, which reassessed the county’s 102,685 land parcels, carried out 8,649 informal appeals, the equivalent of about 8.4% of all parcels.

“Originally, 9,482 informal appeals were filed, but 833 property owners withdrew them,” county spokesman Patrick McKenna said in an email.

Homeowners filed all but a few of the informal appeals, McKenna said.

Tobin said he has planned for 10,000 formal appeals.

If you didn’t file an informal appeal doesn’t mean you can’t file a formal one, he said.

Tobin said the county will mail the results of informal appeals to property owners on Friday, too.

A few other rules

He said someone appealing a new value of $700,000 or more must supply a formal appraisal to challenge Tyler’s value.

“If your new assessed value is under $700,000, you can bring comparative sales from Jan. 1, 2022, through June 30, 2024,” Tobin said. “And if you're having a new appraisal done, you can ask the appraiser to set the effective date (of the new appraisal) to June 30, 2024.”

That’s the same 30-month period that Tyler used to come up with new values.

Tobin said the assessment appeal panels will require substantial evidence to alter new values and can raise, lower or keep values the same. People appealing will have 15 minutes to make their case, he said.

Added county costs for appeals

The county will pay $3,700 a month to rent the marketplace space. That includes utilities. For three months, that’s $11,100.

Normally, the county has one three-member Board of Assessment Appeals to hear appeals of values each year.

Because of the new values, the county commissioners created four auxiliary boards that include real-estate agents, two former FBI agents and other professionals.

The county will pay the auxiliary appeals board members $24,000 each, a total of $288,000.

The main board will concentrate on appeals of business valuations. The auxiliary boards will be assigned appeals based on regions, Tobin said.

The county commissioners voted 2-1 on May 18, 2022, to approve a $5,178,088 contract with Tyler to carry out the reassessment.

Borys joins WVIA News from The Scranton Times-Tribune, where he served as an investigative reporter and covered a wide range of political stories. His work has been recognized with numerous national and state journalism awards from the Inland Press Association, Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors, Society of Professional Journalists and Pennsylvania Newsmedia Association.

You can email Borys at boryskrawczeniuk@wvia.org