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.
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