Maddie Gioffre (right) and Shaquille Charles stand in front of their Wilkinsburg home on April 5, 2022. The two purchased the home in early 2020 and were promptly subjected to an assessment appeal. They are the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the way Allegheny County calculates property assessments after appeals. (Photo by Lindsay Dill/PublicSource)
A lawsuit claiming that Allegheny County sends skewed data to the state, thus boosting thousands of property tax bills, is heading for a key hearing.
by Rich Lord, PublicSource
When Maddie Gioffre and Shaquille Charles bought a house in Wilkinsburg in 2020, they’d heard vague mentions that the property taxes could change.
They weren’t prepared, though, for a tax spike that would influence some of the fundamental decisions they face as a young couple. Nor did they expect to become the faces of a challenge to Allegheny County’s increasingly disparate property assessments.
“We were looking for a neighborhood that wasn’t super expensive but was still close to a lot of things in the city, easy commute for him to the med school, walking distance to Frick Park,” said Gioffre, a systems engineer.
They paid $205,000 for a house that needed some renovation. They have come to love Wilkinsburg, said Charles, a fourth-year medical student. But they also feel a little stung. “You buy a new home, and then you’re slapped with the tax,” he said.
School districts throughout the county monitor property sales. Where they find a sale price that is well above the “fair market value” that the county has assigned for tax assessment purposes, they file appeals in hopes of boosting the tax bill. In the case of Gioffre and Charles, an appeal filed last year resulted in a jump in their assigned fair market value, from $87,100 to $179,400. That added a total of around $5,000 to their school, borough and county tax bills.
So much for vacations. “We’ve even pushed back having children,” said Charles. “It’s maybe not because of the taxes only, but that’s a factor that plays into whether or not we can afford a child.”
The two ended up talking with Michael Suley, former manager of the county’s Office of Property Assessments. He told them how the county calculates the tax assessments emerging from appeals, and that he believed there was a flaw in the math. The couple agreed to join a lawsuit seeking to change the math and became the lead plaintiffs, joined by a handful of other couples, businesses and individuals.
A multi-day hearing in the lawsuit is set to start April 27. If the plaintiffs have their way, a judge would order the county to submit new data to a state agency that has a key role in calculating tax bills, potentially pushing thousands of tax bills down.
Meanwhile, Gioffre and Charles pay tax bills that are double those of their neighbors on one side, and triple those of the neighbors on the other. They are quick to note that they don’t want anyone else’s tax bills to soar – but they know other relatively recent homebuyers who have not been subjected to appeals. They would like to see a less arbitrary system.
“I’m all for making schools better. I think Wilkinsburg could use the funds,” said Gioffre. “But I don’t want to be the only one.”
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