Every residential property in Schuylkill County has been visited by a data collection agent working on the tax reassessment.
That was the big takeaway from an update on the reassessment provided by Tim Barr, the executive director at Vision Government Solutions, the company contracted to complete the reassessment.
Barr gave this update at Wednesday’s Schuylkill County Commissioners meeting. It’s his second visit to the Commissioners Board Room and he’s been asked to provide monthly updates on the reassessment going forward.
Even though 100% of the residential properties have been visited, Barr said his team is still conducting follow-up visits at properties. And there are still a majority of commercial properties (61%) on which to collect data, he said.
Data entry on the residential properties visited is 72% complete, Barr added.
Barr also said the reassessment team is working with staff at the County Tax Assessment Office and Geographic Information Systems maps on neighborhood delineation. That helps to identify housing developments and subdivisions that have been created in the last 30 years, about how long it’s been since Schuylkill County last did a tax assessment.
“Your local folks know this county better than I ever could,” Barr said. “Identifying locations is a critical part of that.”
Additionally, Barr says VGS’ valuation team has been assessing sales prices on properties over the last six years to get an idea on the trends. This came up because of a prior discussion on one school district in Schuylkill County, Blue Mountain, saying it was raising property taxes this year because of the reassessment.
Technically, Blue Mountain told taxpayers there that it was raising property taxes because the County hadn’t done a reassessment in 30 years and its “real estate assessed values are set at 1996 prices” and that it’s “missing out on realistic proeprty values of 2024.”
Barr said, “The school districts may be talking about needing to raise taxes now because they know they’re not going to be able to do spot appeals when the reassessment is over. Legally, they can but there will be no point in it because there will not be big-ticket properties under-assessed for them to go get. It is revenue neutral. It will be a net sum zero to the tax base of every taxing body the year this is implemented.”
According to the reassessment timeline, data collection likely will conclude this Fall. Proposed value mailings and informal reviews of the new assessments will happen in Spring 2025 and formal change of assessments will go out on July 1, 2025.
Barr said his team expects to go through “tens of thousands” of informal reviews between now and this time next year.
The formal appeals process on the new assessments will take place between July and October 2025 with the new tax assessment values set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2026.
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