Lackawanna County filed and county President Judge James Gibbons denied Friday a motion for emergency relief seeking to extend the implementation deadline of the county’s reassessment to 2027.
The motion sought to amend a stipulated court order requiring the county implement by Jan. 1, 2026, new assessments calculated during its first reassessment since 1968 for use in all property taxation next year. The county agreed to the deadline and other terms of the order in 2022, postponing further action in a civil lawsuit seeking to compel reassessment on the basis of tax fairness.
The plaintiffs in that case, Brian Skotch and Ronald Monroe, contend the county’s long-outdated 1968 assessments have resulted in an unfair distribution of the tax burden, with some property owners paying far more than their fair share and others paying far less. Their attorney, Marielle Macher, said Gibbons held a hearing Friday morning on the county’s emergency motion and denied it.
“Judge Gibbons stated verbally that he is denying the motion,” Macher said in an email. “The motion and order denying it should eventually appear on the public docket, though that may not be immediate.”
The online court docket does show that Gibbons denied the motion, but his order denying it was not yet scanned an imaged as of about 11 a.m. Friday.
Friday’s developments follow an exchange of letters this week where an attorney for the county, John Dean, proposed extending the reassessment’s implementation deadline by a year and Macher, on behalf of her clients, rejected the proposal. Efforts to reach Republican Commissioner Chris Chermak, the chief advocate for delaying the reassessment, were not immediately successful Friday.
The statutory deadline for the county Assessor’s Office to certify the new values for use next year in compliance with the court order is Saturday.
Dean’s letter and the motion he filed Friday on the county’s behalf cited deficiencies in reassessment notices mailed to property owners earlier this year. Those notices lacked property owners’ old assessments as required by state statute, among other issues, the county argued.
Macher and Democratic Commissioner Bill Gaughan, who has long criticized the notion that the county can or should delay implementing the reassessment, both rejected this week that the notice deficiencies amounted to fatal defects justifying a reassessment delay.
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