yes, you don’t need a high pagerank to be given an “authority site” status.

I found one site with just PR 4. It’s Wall’s Industries. And from Google authority site status: here. So, don’t be fooled by marketing guys that tell you that you need a high PR to achieve that status. In fact, there are a lot of such sites with PR 5 as well. And there are a lot of high PR sites which wasn’t given the “authority site” status.