Updates
On October 18, 2010, Freedom Township's three-person board of supervisors voted unanimously to file an injunction in the Adams County Court of Common Pleas to halt the current Adams County county-wide reassessment completed by 21st Century Appraisals.
On November 1, 2010, Freedom Township filed its lawsuit at the Adams County Court of Common Pleas to set aside the Adams County reassessment and keep the county from using those values in 2011. Additionally, all four Adams County Court of Common Pleas judges recused themselves from participating in the lawsuit because they are all Adams County property owners and the Pennsylvania Code of Judicial Conduct instructs them to disqualify themselves in proceedings where their impartiality might be reasonably questioned. However, the judges will retain jurisdiction over individual appeals as they come through the Adams County Court of Common Pleas.
On November 15, 2010, Judge Yvette Kane of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District Court of Pennsylvania ruled that the lawsuit filed by Freedom Township against Adams County to stop the reassessment of property values will be heard in federal court because the suit alleged violations of due-process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
On November 15, 2010, Adams County commissioners unanimously voted to certify the county-wide reassessment values even though there are still over 300 formal appeals yet to be heard. The commissioners believe that the small amount of outstanding appeals will have little effect on the values. According to Chief Assessor Barbara Walter, the county has 44,109 taxable parcels, valued at $9,238,889,200. In 2010, the assessed value of all non-exempt property in the county was $2,095,684,104. Walter said that the millage would drop from 15.45 mills in 2010 to 3.5113 mills in 2011. This change in mills complies with state law prohibiting taxing authorities from gaining a windfall from the county-wide reassessment. In Adams County, revenue from real estate tax before the county-wide reassessment was $32,440,409.84; the new millage will result in an estimated revenue of $32,440,511.64, according to Walter.
On February 7, 2011, Senior Judge Joseph Kleinfelter issued a case management order in Freedom Township’s lawsuit against Adams County that sets the trial for 9:30 a.m. September 27, 2011 at the Adams County Courthouse. The only issue in the case is the coefficient of dispersion (COD). The County claims that the COD for the reassessment was 3.96 percent and Freedom Township claims it was 24 percent. In the settlement of an earlier lawsuit, which spurred the reassessment in the first place, President Judge John D. Kuhn had ordered the reassessed property values have a COD of no greater than 15 percent.