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You walk into a store to buy a thingamajig and the proprietor says the cost is a percentage of the amount of money in your wallet. You pull out $200 and are told the charge is 10 percent, or $20. Sounds fair, but you decide to shop around.
You go to a store across the street where the price is also a percent of your money. Since you still have $200, you assume a comparison will be simple, and ask the rate. The proprietor says “80 percent” and your jaw drops as you point out the competition is only charging 10 percent.
“Oh,” the store owner replies, “we assess the value of your money differently. The total you have here is a small fraction of the total you have there.”
Though incredulous, you ask how much your $200 is worth in calculating a price.
“Well,” the store owner says, “that depends on when the bills were printed.”
Such a system seems insane, right? Yet that is the way Wilkes-Barre has operated its property taxes for seven years.
Luzerne County completed property reassessment in 2009, the first update since 1965. Because property values change with the market, improvement or demolitions, the old assessed values were often out of line with actual values. That meant many people paid less in taxes than they should have while others paid more. The update helped erase those inequities.
For reasons never adequately explained, Wilkes-Barre was the only municipality that chose not to use the new property reassessments. Which means Wilkes-Barre property owners have two assessed values: The county’s, which is very similar to how much the property would sell for, and the city’s, which has nothing to do with reality.
Property is taxed in mills — a $1 tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. Under the new assessments, your taxes are easy to calculate: If you have a house assessed at $100,000, every mill in taxes costs you $100. That’s true of county, school district and municipal property taxes.
Except in Wilkes-Barre. The same house may be assessed at some tiny fraction, say $1,000. To make any money, the city has to charge an outrageous-sounding millage rate of 121.63. By comparison, Wilkes-Barre Area School District’s millage rate is 16.299
That sounds low, but it means a bill of $1,623 on that $100,000 house. Your city tax bill? Despite the high-sounding millage, it’s probably a few hundred dollars.
This arcane system makes it all but impossible to judge if your property is assessed fairly, if the city’s tax rate is reasonable compared to other municipalities, and if others in the city are paying their fair share compared to your taxes.
It’s time for the system to change. Mayor Tom Leighton, in office when the city decided to ignore the county reassessment, is leaving. The two men hoping to replace him — Democrat Tony George and Republican Frank Sorick, should either promise to drag Wilkes-Barre’s assessments out of the 1960s or explain in great detail why they won’t.