An attorney representing Lackawanna County sent a letter Monday inquiring about a potential one-year delay in implementing new assessed property values calculated during the county’s first comprehensive reassessment since 1968.
The letter from attorney John Dean to attorney Marielle Macher, the lawyer representing local plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the county’s decadeslong failure to reassess, pertains to a Jan. 1 deadline the county must meet to implement new assessed values under a stipulated court order. County officials agreed to the order’s terms in 2022, postponing further action in the civil suit seeking to compel a reassessment on the basis of tax fairness.
Plaintiffs in the case contend the county’s long-outdated 1968 assessments have resulted in disparate taxes on similar properties, with some property owners paying far more than their fair share in taxes and some paying far less.
Dean’s letter proposes extending the implementation deadline to Jan. 1, 2027, citing issues with reassessment notices sent to property owners earlier this year.
It follows months of handwringing over the reassessment and calls by some property owners, political candidates and county officials, particularly Republican Commissioner Chris Chermak, for the county to pursue a pause. Advocates of the pause have expressed concern about the accuracy of new values calculated during the reassessment, its impact on future tax bills and over difficulty getting timely appraisals done on commercial properties.
Lackawanna County Commissioner Chris Chermak speaks during the final budget hearing held at the county government center in Scranton Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
Democratic Commissioner Bill Gaughan, for his part, has defended the reassessment process and criticized proposals to pause it as wrong-headed and irresponsible.
The letter also follows the late-October swearing in of Democratic Commissioner Brenda Sacco, who’ll soon be replaced by Democratic commissioner-elect Thom Welby, and comes as the county barrels toward a Nov. 15 deadline to certify the new assessed values. Welby campaigned on a platform that included delaying the reassessment.
In his letter, Dean noted that previously sent notices advising property owners of their new assessments failed to include the value of their old assessments as required by state law. The county would include that information in future notices if granted the one-year extension.
“This will ensure that Lackawanna County, as it desires to do, will implement the reassessment in compliance with the law, but also give its taxpayers the proper notice — which results in fairness and equity to all affected taxpayers,” the letter reads. “Thus, Lackawanna County proposes a stipulation to change the date of Jan. 1, 2026, to Jan. 1, 2027, to implement the reassessment based upon the 2024 base year.”
New assessed values calculated during the reassessment should reflect the market value of properties as of June 30, 2024, hence the reference to the 2024 base year. Those values would be used by taxing bodies to calculate 2026 property tax bills if the terms of the stipulated court order don’t change and no extension is achieved.
Efforts to reach Macher on Monday were not immediately successful, but she previously expressed no appetite to extend the implementation deadline.
“If the county unilaterally changed the timeline, it would be in blatant violation of the court order, and we would have no choice but to move to enforce the court order,” she wrote in an email Oct. 24. “We have also seen no justification from the county for failing to implement the reassessed values under the court-ordered deadline. The county has produced to us no evidence that it needs more time, and we are aware of no systemic problems with the reassessed values. To the contrary, the reassessment appears on track to do exactly what it was supposed to do — result in a fairer distribution of the tax burden, especially for the owners of lower value homes, who are currently paying a vastly disproportionate share of the tax burden under the 1968 base year.”
“Delaying implementation of the reassessment will simply force over-assessed low-income homeowners to continue to pay more than their fair share,” Macher said at the time.
Gaughan expressed a similar sentiment Monday.
“Any notion that this process should be stopped or delayed is completely baseless,” he said in an email. “Doing so would ignore that data, waste years of expert work, and continue an unfair system that forced many residents to shoulder more than their fair share.”
Reassessment report
Gaughan pointed to a recent report issued by Tyler Technologies, the firm that conducted the reassessment for the county, showing the county’s reassessment passed a key metric used by the International Association of Assessing Officers to gauge how accurately assessed property values reflect market values.
That metric, called the median appraisal-to-sale ratio, measures the relationship between appraised value and the sale price of properties. An appraisal-to-sale ratio lower than 1 indicates that the appraised value is lower than market value, while an ASR over 1 indicates the appraised value exceeds market value.
An acceptable range is between 0.9 and 1.1.
Tyler tested the reassessment’s accuracy by calculating a median appraisal-to-sale ratio based on the results of 5,133 sales occurring in Lackawanna County between Jan. 1, 2022 and June 30, 2024. The result was a median appraisal-to-sale ratio of 0.98, well within the acceptable range.
Asked if that ratio was good for the county, county assessment Director Pat Tobin said it was “excellent.”
Lackawanna County Commissioner Bill Gaughan speaks during the final budget hearing held at the county government center in Scranton Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. (SEAN MCKEAG / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)
Gaughan also rejected the notion that the failure to include old assessed values on mailed reassessment notices amounts to a fatal defect. He shared an email then-county Solicitor Donald Frederickson sent in August expressing as much. It cites a portion of state law that says, in part, no “defect in service of any notice shall be sufficient grounds for setting any assessment aside.”
Gaughan also forwarded a document from a Tyler Technologies official estimating a yearlong delay could cost the county another $2.5 million, given the extra work it would entail.
“The idea of pausing it for a year is like jumping off a roof with an umbrella,” Gaughan said. “It makes no sense whatsoever.”