In July, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Valley Forge Towers Apartments v. Upper Merion Area School District and Keystone Realty Advisors, No. 49 NAP 2016, (July 5), holding that a taxing authority's practice of filing assessment appeals for commercial properties, but not other types of ­properties, violated the uniformity clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution.

The Valley Forge case began when Upper Merion School District engaged a third party firm Keystone Realty Advisors, to help it ­select property assessments within its taxing boundaries to appeal. The school district's authority for such appeals, which are sometimes called reverse tax appeals, stemmed from Pennsylvania's Consolidated County Assessment Law, which governs all ­counties in Pennsylvania except Philadelphia County and Allegheny County. According to the court's decision, on Keystone's ­recommendation, the school district ­concentrated solely on commercial properties, including apartment complexes. Keystone's recommendation was premised on the fact that commercial properties' values were generally higher than those of single-family homes, and that, ­therefore, successfully raising their assessments would result in a greater tax-revenue increase than doing the same with under-assessed single-family homes, even including those that were under-assessed by a greater percentage.

Following the school district's appeals, a group of apartment-owner taxpayers filed a separate complaint in the Court of Common Pleas against the school district and Keystone, alleging that the school district's selective appeal strategy unconstitutionally targeted high-value commercial properties. The taxpayers claimed the school district had an additional motive in targeting only commercial properties: that assessment appeals of residential properties would likely anger residential property owners who vote in local elections and it would be politically unpopular to seek to raise their assessments. The taxpayers sought declaratory and ­injunctive relief, asserting that the selective strategy of only appealing commercial properties violated the Pennsylvania Constitution's uniformity clause, which mandates that all classes of properties be taxed uniformly. At the Court of Common Pleas, the taxpayers' complaint was dismissed for failure to state a cause of action. The Commonwealth Court affirmed the dismissal, holding that the school ­district needed only to have a rational basis for selecting the properties it chose to appeal in order to satisfy the uniformity clause. The taxpayers appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.