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4 Prob. & Prop. 13 (1990)
Goodbye to the Welcome Stranger Rule

handle is hein.journals/probpro4 and id is 285 raw text is: Goodbye to the Welcome Stranger Rule he welcome stranger property tax assessment policy of West Virginia's Webster County found a cool reception in the U.S. Supreme Court. The high Court held, in a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, that the assessment of a coal mining property in the county ran afoul of the fourteenth amend- ment's equal protection clause. Allegheny Pittsburgh Coal Co. v. County Comm'n of Webster County, West Virginia, 109 S. Ct. 633 (1989). In so ruling, however, the Court may have opened the door to examination of issues broader than the assessment practices of a single county in West Virginia. The holding may even cast doubt on the validity of California's restrictions on reassessments under Proposition 13. The assessment in question was based on current market value, as determined by the county assessor based on the assessed property's most recent selling price. Similar properties in the county were, howev- er, assessed at a small fraction of their current market value. Thus the reference to this policy as the welcome stranger rule: the new property owner is always welcome because he or she bears a dispropor- tionate share of the tax burden. In so holding, the Court reaffirmed a long- standing but recently dormant princi- ple, quoting from Sunday Lake Iron Co. v. Wakefield, 247 U.S. 350 (1918): IlIntentional systematic undervalua- tion by state officials of other taxable property in the same class contra- venes the constitutional right of one taxed upon the full value of his prop- erty. See Cumberland Coal Co. v. Board By Michael Handler of Revision of Tax Assessments, 284 U.S. 23, 52 S. Ct. 48 (1931); Sioux City Bridge Co. v. Dakota County, 260 U.S. 441, 43 S. Ct. 190 (1923). The Court thus reaffirmed that a victim of discrimina- tory assessment prac- tice has a claim for Althc relief based on the federal equal protec- tion clause. Facts of the Case do if In Allegheny cases Pittsburgh, the tax- payer purchased its next property in 1974 for $24 million. Under the local practice of assessing at 50% of market value, the istf county set the assess- ment at $12 million. For other similar properties, however, the Court found that the county assessor had assessed each property at 50% of the selling price of the property based on the property's most recent arms' length sale and had made only minor revisions in the assessments since those sales. Allegheny Pittsburgh's property was assessed at roughly 8 to 35 times more than comparable neighboring properties. The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia denied relief, finding that the record did not support the trial court's ruling that the actions of the assessor and Board of Review constituted intentional and systematic discrimination. 360 S.E.2d 560 (W.Va. 1987). The court also held that the proper remedy of the petitioner was to seek to have the assessment of other taxpayers raised to market value. According to the Court in Alle- gheny Pittsburgh, this approach in assessing resulted in gross dispari- ties in the assessed value of generally comparable property, and denied the petitioners the equal protection of the laws guaranteed to them by the Fourteenth Amendment. It is unquestionable that the prac- tice of the county assessor evidenced in Allegheny Pittsburgh produced dis- parate results. Gross discrepancies resulted because, although the same percentage of value was used in each case, the value to which the percent- age was applied differed, depending September/October

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