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Urging the Board of Revision of Taxes to adopt a policy of accepting all nunc pro tunc property assessment appeals filed for Tax Year 2023 by January 2, 2023, due to the ongoing delay in mailing of property re-assessment notices.
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WHEREAS, Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment (OPA) completed a citywide re-assessment of property values for Tax Year 2023 and certified those assessments. State statute requires certification by March 31, 2022. See 53 P.S. ? 8565(c) (setting certification deadline); and
WHEREAS, The average property assessment increase resulting from that re-assessment was 21%. The average residential property assessment increase was 31%. As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, residential assessments more than doubled in some neighborhoods; and
WHEREAS, The Inquirer also reported that the largest assessment increases were concentrated in predominantly low-income, Black and Brown neighborhoods; and
WHEREAS, The re-assessments also contained some glaring inaccuracies. Frequently, identical homes in comparable condition have assessment disparities of ten of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although an audit commissioned by the OPA concluded that this year's assessments meet industry standards for accuracy, prior independent analyses have found that, while OPA assessments met industry standards at the citywide level, they did not consistently do so at the neighborhood level; and
WHEREAS, Despite its March deadline for certifying property assessments for Tax Year 2023, OPA did not make the re-assessments public until they were published online on May 9, 2022; and
WHEREAS, In past years, the OPA has mailed notices of re-assessment in the April or May following certification. This year, however, the OPA has not yet mailed notices of re-assessment and has stated publicly that it will not mail notices until as late as September 1, 2022; and
WHEREAS, Many property owners have, in the past, rel...
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