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Please rise, court is now in session. I strenuously object.A legal podcast brought to you by the Pittsburgh law firm of Flaherty Fardo isnow in session. All those seeking information about the law and legal mattersaffecting the people of Pittsburgh and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, half-baked opinions and a dose of self -indulgence are invited to attend andparticipate. I want the truth! You can't handle the truth! The defensestrenuously objects. You would!
all the first witness. Welcome to I strenuously object. I amBill Rogel, partner in the law firm, Flaherty, Fardo, Rogel and Amick, joiningus as well. The queen of tax appeals herself, Her Majesty Nicole Amick, also apartner in the aforesaid Flaherty, Fardo, Rogel and Amick. Nicole, how youdoing? Good morning, Bill. So we're going to break some news here. It's a casethat we handled. The breaking news is mostly maintenance of what we thought thestatus quo was and but a real
a real bullet that the taxpayers dodged here. So to do this,I'm going to have to give you a little bit of background. All names have beenchanged, check the innocent. But we were involved in a case where we filed atax appeal. Heck, it may have been a school district appeal back in 2021. Itwas a school district appeal. It carried over into 2022. There was a decisionat the Board of Property Assessment Appeals in review that got appealed to theBoard of Viewers level.
In early, I believe it was February of 2022, we reached asettlement in front of the board of viewers. That settlement's fixed andassessed value for our client's property for both 2021 and 2022, even thoughthe decision itself was made in February of 2022. This was, you know, afterthe, like the lawsuit itself was filed, but before all the real nuts and boltsand kind of crazy things went on with the common level ratio for 2022.
including court orders and injunctions and appellateprocedure and everything else. So at that point, the CLR for that year wasstill 81 .1%. 81 .1%. And on that basis, and with that number in mind, thiscase settled. Now, we're not going to disclose our client's name. I'm not hereto put the school district or the school district attorney on blast, nothinglike that, right? Obviously later in 2022,
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everything's changes. The CLR for 2022 changes in a waythat, you know, mostly got solidified all the way into 2023. And as you loyallistener and property tax aficionado may remember, County Council ended uppassing an ordinance that opened up a special appeals period where people wereallowed in the first quarter of 2023 to appeal their 2022 tax assessment, kindof go back in time as if they had appealed it back then based upon the new CLRfigure.
which was Nicole. 63 .5%. I'm only in the ballpark on stuff.So I'm glad you're here to make sure that I give accurate information.Initially, they opened up that appeals window. And the BPAR itself, the countyadministrative office that handles these appeals started trying to not acceptappeals for people who had already reached a resolution already appealed andreached a resolution the prior year. And
County council said, well, no, that's not our intent. Andthey passed another ordinance clarifying the first ordinance. So the first onewas in January, the second was in June or July of 2023, where they're saying,no, no, no, the whole point here is to let people who already had appeals stillbe able to appeal. So it clarified this special appeals period that we openedup specifically is intended to apply to all.
all properties irrespective of whether they had already anappeal, had a pending appeal, already had a determination, reached a settlementor anything else. So fast forward a couple months and we had a school districtfile a petition with the court under the old case number because again it wentto the board of viewers and basically they were seeking an injunction from thecourt that would stop the county, the board of property assessment appeals inreview from issuing a decision regarding
regarding 2022 because that had already been settled anddecided. And so what this was essentially doing was the school was asking thecourt to come in and say the settlement that was reached back in February of2022 cannot be disturbed by a subsequent act of county council. And thatsettlement has to remain valid. The county, who by the way, is a party to thissettlement, cannot come in by an act of legislation and essentially overrule a
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court order, right, because these settlements, in additionto being agreed to by the parties are signed off on by the court. It was a non-trivialkind of legal issue. But it was essentially asking the court to completelyinvalidate, like the most significant places where this ordinance that openedthe special appeal period worked, right? Everyone is entitled to file thoseappeals with the people who were most clearly aggrieved.
by the old CLR are the people who had that old CLR appliedto actually set their property tax figure. And those were the people who wereinvolved in cases that settled or reached a resolution in 2022 prior to knowingthe CLR was gonna change and prior to the appeal period being opened up by thecounty. So long story short, the case was heard by Judge Hertzberg or themotion was heard by Judge Hertzberg who was the one who had been...
rendering decisions on the underlying case that reset theCLR and decided that the county was engaged in wrongdoing. And Judge Hertzbergsided with the property owners here, right? That these property owners wereaggrieved by that old CLR. And the thing to remember here is this is a remedialact by Allegheny County Council, by which I mean the underlying case that JudgeHertzberg heard found that the county had been submitting,
systematically incorrect information that then had the statecalculating the CLR at an inflated number that resulted in across the boardover assessment of properties that were assessed in the year subject to thatappeal. And this kind of systematic over taxation based upon improperlysubmitted and improperly kind of called evidence to the state, Judge Hartsburghimself in the original appeal started talking about it.
in these constitutional terms, right? That it's aconstitutional violation to subject property owners to an inaccurate andultimately like obtained by way of systematic violations of statutes and lawsby the county. And the only way the county could fix this, right? The countyitself decided, got together and said, well, we have to fix this, right? Wemessed up and these property owners are paying taxes that are too high and theycreated the special appeal.
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And the court sided with the property owners having hadtheir rights aggrieved over separation of powers concerns as far as whether ornot those court decisions could be appealed. So what's the outgrowth of this,Nicole? I where does this leave us? Well, I think that the school district istrying to cut their losses. And by filing that motion, they were trying toprevent property owners who had artificially high
assessment values from being able to appeal again, becausethey're worried about the loss of revenue. Now this is across large commercialbuildings. I mean, there's a lot of cases, I think, that had new appeals filedfor 2022. So my guess is, because I spoke with a lot of other property appealattorneys, no one else was dealing with this motion. I think they picked acase, wanted to see what happened, and were trying to restrict property ownersfrom exercising that new appeal window for 2022. Like you said, those were themost aggrieved parties because they were...
the ones that had been subjected specifically to the wrongratio. Now at the time we didn't know it was the wrong ratio, but subsequentlywe did find that out. So it was an interesting motion. I was very surprised tosee it because only one office is filing these types of motions. They havesince indicated that they will not be filing any more motions and that shouldbe the end of that issue. So hopefully that's true. Other attorney offices thatare other solicitors for different school districts and boroughs have acceptedthe fact that these property owners are permitted.
by County Council to file new 2022 appeals. So no one elsehas raised any issues with that. So hopefully that will be the end of thisissue and all the property owners will be given their rights as AlleghenyCounty Council intended to file these new 2022 appeals. And I'm hoping thatthere's no other issues related to that. Yeah. And I mean, look, we've talkedabout this. We have no idea why this specific client, this specific propertyowner was the one that this specific school district chose to be the one wherethey tried.
to file this motion and get the board to not consider theirappeal. I mean, it seems completely arbitrary. There is nothing that stands outabout this case, these facts or whatever that make reasonable to me why thisproperty and not one of the thousands of others that are similarly situated waschosen for this single motion. But if the school district had been successful,if the court agreed and said, that's right, we're gonna quash that appeal.We're gonna instruct BPAR not to give a new figure for 2022.
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I can promise you there would have been hundreds orthousands more of this kind of motion filed to quash all the similarly situatedappeals because the considerations would have been the same. There was nothingsufficiently unique where if this had been granted, it would have really openedthe floodgates and undid a lot of the work that county council did in creatingthe special appeals period in the first place. I guess this is kind of a quickvictory lap, right? I don't know why they pick a case.
But we argued it and we won and our appeals are going to beable to go forward. And, you know, it was just one case. You know, the schooldistricts didn't file hundreds and lose hundreds. But the implications, if wehad lost beyond just what it would have meant to that specific client, werepretty astronomical. So, you know, hundreds, thousands of Allegheny Countytaxpayers, you know, including ones we represent and including ones we don'trepresent.
you know, really benefited by this outcome. So, you know, ifyou want, if you want to send us your thanks or, you know, some, you know,remuneration for a job well done, we'll certainly accept that. But no, youknow, we're not here to demand anyone's specific thanks or adulation just tolet you know, you know, this was a thing that was potentially out there. And,you know, we are glad that, you know, the courts...
And the county council have worked in concert here to makesure property owners have the ability to have their assessments decided basedon, you know, the correct CLR using the actual information that legally thecounty was required to submit in the first place. Yeah, that's a good thing.Honestly, I think that they picked this case because it was a residentialproperty, not a commercial property. And when you start dealing with largecommercial properties, there's a lot of money.
So they'll spend a lot of money to defend the right topotentially save, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars for 2022. So Ithink they picked a random residential case that maybe they thought no onewould do anything on. Obviously they were wrong in that. And the fact that wewere successful in making that argument, which was the correct argument, that'sspecifically what Allegheny County Council stated in various ways. So I thinkit was a win and.
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I'm really happy that Judge Hertzberg had the case becauseobviously he's familiar with all the issues as well. It was just interesting tome that they even tried to do that. I guess I get why they tried to do it, butI think Judge Hertzberg definitely made the right decision. All right. Thankyou for joining us for what seems to have been a genuinely brief episode of ITrenuously Object. Please subscribe, rate, and review the podcast. Tell yourfriends, tell your enemies, tell whoever you can to check us out.
If you have questions, whether it's for our mailing it insegment or any feedback whatsoever for the podcast, you can email us. That'siObject at pghfirm .com. We are on Instagram at iStrenuouslyObjectPodcast. Andfor more information on property tax appeals, 2024 appeals in particular, ifyou want to have your case reviewed for free, you can visit Flaherty Fardo,Rogel and Amick's website at pghfirm .com. So until next time, some partingadvice.
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