Coming Soon to Lehigh County: Reassessment

If you see a black van driving slowly down your street taking videos of your house after March 1, chances are you’re not under surveillance.

Lehigh County is beginning the process of reassessing all properties to get a more accurate value for tax purposes. The new assessments won’t go into effect until 2013 but taxpayers will be

notified of their new assessments in early 2012, according to Lehigh County Executive Don Cunningham. The last reassessment was in 1991.

Cunningham gave an update on those plans to about 50 people – mostly representatives of municipalities in the county – at a Congress of Governments meeting Tuesday afternoon.

The reassessment itself is “revenue neutral,” Cunningham said, meaning the county’s total income will not change as a result of it.  But there will be winners and losers, he said.

“My hope is that in doing this we will more accurately get ourselves squared up with the reality out there,” Cunningham said.

Last year more than 700 property owners appealed their current assessments, he said. 

Lehigh County Commissioner Daniel McCarthy, whose District 4 represents parts of  South Whitehall, Whitehall and Allentown, said when businesses or others successfully appeal their assessments, it puts more of a burden on all other property owners.

“This is designed for more fairness in the mix,” McCarthy said.

After the meeting, Tom Muller, county director of administration, said that black vans from Pictometry International Corp. from Rochester, N.Y., will take videos of all properties on every public access road in the county over about two months.

“They will tend to do it on off hours if they can because they ideally want to get no people” in the videos, Muller said. The company provides multiple views of every parcel and building, including aerial views.

But don’t worry about someone knocking on your door asking to see whether you redid your kitchen. 

“There will be no assessors coming in anybody’s house,” Muller said. In addition to outside photos, the county will use building permit records and other data to assess the value of a home or business.

The reassessment will mostly be done in house by Lehigh County staff, which will save the county millions, Cunningham said. This year the county budgeted about $350,000 for the process and expects to spend about the same next year, he said.

The county plans to notify taxpayers of their new assessments in February or March of 2012 and they will have the rest of the year  to appeal if they don’t agree with the new number, Muller said.

Once the new assessments are set, the county will reconfigure its millage tax rate, Muller said. It is likely that most property values will have increased in the county since 1991, even with the recent downturn. “Then the millage is going to go down correspondingly so we can bring in the same revenue,” he said.

Currently, the county property tax rate is 11.9 mills.

In other business, Cunningham warned municipal officials that if the county has authorized money from its Green Futures fund to be spent on a park in their community, they should get started on the work soon.

“We do have 2.4 million in already authorized Green Future funds,” he said. “If you have that money approved, get moving on those projects. I can’t guarantee that money won’t get pulled back in 2012.”