OMT vs. Allegheny County

Here at OMT, we haven’t had much to say about the mindbending clusterfuck which is the court-ordered property reassessment that residents of Allegheny County are currently enduring, and for what we think are sound reasons. We are hip-deep in the process of appealing our reassessment, and we don’t want to drag all of that unpleasantness into OMT. God knows, there are enough unpleasant topics from which to draw for this blog, and dissecting one in which we are personally vested seems somehow inappropriate, if not too easy.

However, it does interfere with our news cycle this morning, as we have an 8:00AM meeting today with the folks from City Controller Michael Lamb’s office in order to review strategies for our appeal. Lamb’s office has been extraordinarily helpful in this process, with assistance including determining more appropriate comparable properties, providing city-subsidized appraisers for qualified home owners, and even offering free legal counsel to attend your appeal along with you.

A couple of weeks ago, Lamb appeared at a packed neighborhood meeting at our community center here in Swisshelm Park, where he answered people’s questions about their assessments, and presented the litany of services that his office is providing to people who are appealing. All in all, we were very impressed with his knowledge of the process, his understanding about what went wrong (Swisshelm Park in general, and Raymond Street in particular, was one of the hardest-hit areas in the city … the land assessment alone for the property that we own went from $14,000 to $72,000, which was fairly typical, to say nothing of the house itself), and his desire to help many of the elderly residents of our neighborhood, many of whom are facing significantly higher property values, and fear that they may be taxed out homes they’ve raised their families in and have lived in all their lives. We supported Michael Lamb in the mayoral primary against Mayor Skippy (and Bill Peduto) last time around, and we still think that he would make a fine mayor of our city.

Of course, Mitt Romney would probably make a better mayor of Pittsburgh than Luke Ravenstahl.

It’s been some time since we’ve had to be anywhere at 8:00AM, and so we will have to cut this short. After we have our hearing (which is yet to be rescheduled) we may decide to write about this whole ugly process, but for the time being, and on this topic, we’d like to keep that OMT perspective for which we are so famous.