Kidder Township resident Robert Bieniek did not know what to expect when he headed into his tax appeal at the Courthouse Annex in Jim Thorpe on Tuesday.

When he first received his appeal in the mail, he figured that a slight increase in his tax rate would be acceptable.Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.“In your mind, you’re thinking, ‘OK, well I can deal with helping the school out with $100, $200 more in a tax year,’” Bieniek said.“I called, and I was just about floored. I said, ‘You’re kidding me! What about people who are just making ends meet? And you’re going to be putting $140 tab on top of their mortgage bill each month?’ And we’re just talking about the school. What if Kidder Township decides they’re going to do an increase? Or if the county decides they’re going to do an increase?”On Tuesday morning, Jim Thorpe Area School District solicitor Gregory Mousseau requested a continuance for the tax appeal hearings, which were set to begin that day.The request for a continuance stemmed from the massive showing of residents and business owners who sought to challenge the appeals at the district’s board of education meeting on Monday.Some people didn’t attend scheduled hearings Tuesday because the board said it wanted to delay the decision. However, the request was denied.Board of assessment member Dwight A. Penberth said that the reasoning behind the denial was plainly spelled out in the law, which provides for specific incidents that would warrant a postponement.Postponement requests can be made by mail at least five days ahead of a hearing. Continuances can be granted at the board’s discretion, but are usually reserved for individual cases involving a sickness or death.While a request for a withdraw of the tax appeals could possibly have gone through, the result would have been a waste of money, according to Penberth.“We had to move on, make a decision. We knew what the rules were, it didn’t qualify, so we moved on,” Penberth said.“They had the option of withdrawing them all, and then some heads would have exploded. Think of how much it cost the these people, the county and the school, to process this information. They had to send out those little cards to the lawyers, they had to send them out to the homeowners, schedule this board to be tied up two months, three days a week, there’s a lot of money involved. And then, for them to just willy-nilly say, ‘We want a continuance,’ we would have never got them done in the fall.”Robert Frycklund, solicitor for the Board of Assessment, agreed that the very nature of moving several hundred cases into the fall session would have been problematic in and of itself.“As a practical matter, with the fall appeals we have from Sept. 1 to the end of October,” he said. “This would dump 650-plus appeals into that finite period. This is really the only time we have to do that.”In addition to what the board already has lined up for the fall, Penberth said that the addition of the tax appeals could have pushed them up to 1,500 cases in a two-month period.Despite that the matter could have been continued, Mousseau said that the school district is still in the right as the tax appeals go on.“I believe that the school district has done the appropriate thing,” he said. “This is what the law allows. This is the same law that would allow for a tax reduction, in some cases. It’s treating everybody fairly.”Attorney Kim Roberti, who pushed for the school board to outright withdraw the tax appeals, was not surprised by the board of assessment’s decision to turn down the continuance.“I would have been shocked had they granted it,” he said. “I understand how impractical it is. One or two is one story. With 600 appeals, it runs every day of the week until the end of June.”Roberti was quick to point out that Jim Thorpe Area School District’s board of education will be holding a committee meeting to discuss the tax appeals on Monday night at the high school, and that they can still choose to put in for a withdraw. Appeals that have not taken place can easily be withdrawn, and Roberti said he is fairly confident that appeals that have not been decided yet could also be withdrawn.“I don’t think last night was make-or-break. It would have been nice to withdraw, but it’s not the last chance,” he said.For now, though, some residents like Bieniek are looking into taking matters into their own hands, in order to avoid hefty costs down the road.“I’m just going to have to go my own way and hire an attorney,” Bieniek said outside the hearing room, looking at a paper with his tax increase of $140 a month written on it. “I have no choice, I can’t afford that.”