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Last month, along with the release of tax assessments tallied as part of the Actual Value Initiative, Mayor Nutter sent out a spreadsheet of how the tax reform would affect his property and those of top staffers. Among other results, it appeared that Nutter stands to save a not-insubstantial amount of money. Given some dissent in City Council over how to proceed with AVI, we thought, "Why not go a step further and look at how AVI would affect every single council member?"
Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown has had a rough few years. In the midst of a divorce, she was fined by the Ethics Board and tied to a scandal that resulted in her former campaign manager pleading guilty to wire fraud. Reynolds Brown has also stated that she has had financial troubles. It would seem that those problems have spilled over to her former home at 601 N. 33rd St. It is now a rental property that she previously claimed as a source of income on financial-disclosure forms — and it is also tax delinquent.
Her husband, Howard Brown, technically owns the row house in the city’s Mantua section, but Reynolds Brown’s name appears on the current rental license. The property is in arrears to the tune of $4,223 and the city has placed two liens on the house for nonpayment. Reynolds Brown says she purchased that property “shortly after college” as part of a first-time-homebuyer program operated by the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp. in 1980. During her first campaign for an at-large City Council seat in 1999, she transferred the property to her husband’s name. Reynolds Brown declined to say why she transferred ownership during the heat of a political campaign, calling it “a private decision.”
She denied knowledge of the debt, saying she was first notified about the back taxes, which stretch back to 2011, when City Paper called for comment. Reynolds Brown claims she hasn’t received documents on the status of this property “because they don’t come to my marital residence, where I currently live.” However, the Office of Property Assessment’s listed mailing address for the owner of 601 N. 33rd St. is that “marital residence,” in Wynnefield.
Workers at federal agencies' Philly locations gathered at a protest on Independence Mall this afternoon as part of a nationwide day of protests said they're already receiving furlough notices and planning for reduced government services as a result of the sequester, the budget cuts that came into effect March 1. From reduced housing subsidies to short-staffing of federal corrections facilities to the Liberty Bell and other national park sites closing early, they argue, the impacts in Philly could be signification.
Adam Duncan, who works with the National Park Service and is vice president of AFGE Local 2038, says forget about extended July 4 hours for the Liberty Bell. That will be closing at 5 p.m. daily thanks to the sequester, and eight other buildings could see hours cut back to a few days a week or even face closure. Duncan says chronic understaffing and furloughs have already affected the NPS; some interpreters are now forced to take off two months a year. That, he argued, will result in a negative economic impact for the whole region's business community if it reduces the Independence National Historical Park's 3.6 million annual visitors.
City Councilman Mark Squilla has a low tax bill, even by Philadelphia's famously low standards. But, if the current iteration of the Actual Value Initiative were implemented, Squilla would actually get a break on his already low taxes, even though all his neighbors would get stuck with 160 percent increases.
But the councilman, unlike Philadelphia's numerous tax cheats, isn't happy about saving a few hundred dollars on taxes. He views his bonus as the result of another possible flaw with AVI — the way tax abatements are reconciled with rising home values.
"I was aware that my taxes were going down because of the abatement," said Squilla in an email. "This a perfect reason to phase this process in over a period of years."
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Though most empty lots piss me off, I can understand how they form. Sometimes it's a patch of old buildings too far gone to save that get knocked down. Sometimes there's actually a need for surface parking in the area. Sometimes an owner just doesn't have the resources to save it. This one, however, pisses me off like no other. This is a lot that was cleared for development that was a shitty idea from the rip. On top of that, I hate empty lots that take over what were previously a whole bunch of little streets, and this is one of those as well. Wanna know what else I hate? Parking garages that are right next to surface parking lots. This is one of those, too!!! Even worse, the garage has empty lots on both sides. How much worse can it get? Much worse.
This lot started its development life in the late 1830s. Originally, it consisted of no less than four interstitial streets and one primary street. The little streets were called Craydon Street, Path Street, McDonald Place, and Western Avenue. The larger street was called Palmetto. The small ones were each lined with tiny trinity rowhouses, some built of wood. McDonald Place and Western Avenue each had a private courtyard space. Most likely, these courtyards were where each street's water pump and gas lamp were located. Schuylkill 7th (now 16th), Schuylkill 8th (now 15th), and Palmetto Streets was lined with stately row-mansions. An even tinier set of alleys provided shortcuts to and fro.
By the late 1800s, much of the construction on the small streets started to disappear. The houses on the southern side of McDonald Place were all eliminated in favor of the Talmage & Weidley Brass Foundry, where ingots and castings were made. Once the 20th Century rolled around, even bigger changes happened. The Talmage & Weidley foundry expanded out, creating an annex building in the small block bounded by what was now called Hicks (formerly Path), Mole (formerly Craydon), Florist (previously unnamed), and Spring (previously Cowslip) streets. New houses were built along Hicks Street. On the 16th Street side of the lot, a few buildings were taken down in favor of a relay station for the Keystone Telephone Company.
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The Philadelphia Police Department has failed to rein in stops-and-frisks without reasonable suspicion as required by a 2011 consent decree, according to a report filed today by the American Civil Liberties Union and civil-rights law firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg in federal court.
“This report tells us that the city has not achieved the goal of ensuring that its stop-and-frisk practices are legal and fair,” said lawyer David Rudovsky in a statement. “The PPD will need to improve its own monitoring and supervision systems to meet that goal, or the court will be asked to impose appropriate sanctions.”
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That city and state politicians make poor and sometimes illegal choices with your tax dollars is not at all new but it is inarguably newsworthy.
Earlier this month in City Council, Councilwoman Marian Tasco complimented my "excellent rebuttal to Philadelphia Magazine's latest and continued assault on Black Philadelphia," the rightfully maligned "Being White in Philly." But Tasco's compliment was a prelude to her characterization of the Inquirer's reporting about a prominent black politician's alleged wrongdoing as racist.
The Inquirer obtained two leaked state Office of the Inspector General reports on alleged financial malfeasance committed by two nonprofits closely tied to onetime House Appropriations Chairman Rep. Dwight Evans: the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corp. (OARC) and the Urban Affairs Coalition (UAC).
Last Thursday, the Children's Scholarship Fund Philadelphia held its annual "Lottery Day," an event that announces the winners of nearly 2,000 educational grants that are designed to help families in Philadelphia afford private school tuition. The event not only marks the 14th year the privately funded philanthropic organization has dispensed such grants, but also the first instance that a controversial program, the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC), will be used to finance a portion of the awards.
That program allows private companies to defer up to 90 percent of their state business tax obligation to a "scholarship organization" of their choice in order to finance the private education of low-income children that would otherwise go to underperforming local schools. CSFP is the largest K-8 scholarship provider in Pennsylvania, and about 700 of the 2,000 awardees will receive four-year scholarships funded fully by the OSTC program.
Advocates say the program helps needy students get a quality educations, while critics have assailed it as a "backdoor" school-voucher program that diverts resources from struggling public schools to private academies and religious institutions.
In a raucous protest of the the Nutter administration's hardline stance on contract negotiations with the city's various labor unions, John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty, the electrician's union powerbroker and Christmas enthusiast, railed against the mayor before an angry crowd of fellow union members. His topic: fish sticks.
His screed, delivered on Wednesday, described a plausible if physically impossible scenario in which a presumably transdimensional Mayor Michael Nutter traveled back in time, won a previous mayoral election and, as Nutters are wont to do, cut municipal workers' salaries. The ensuing chain reaction from Nutter's meddling would thus have lead to leaner times for Dougherty's father, a former court employee, retroactively depriving a junior Doc of the trappings of a privileged childhood, namely, fish sticks, pizza, and ice cream.
"This has become personal with me," said Dougherty, noting his father's status as a former city employee.
Hundreds of Northern Liberties residents packed into St. Michael's Church last night to talk about the citywide reassessment of property taxes known as the Actual Value Initiative or AVI. Council President Darrell Clarke was there, along with Councilmen Mark Squilla, Jim Kenney and Bill Green. Failing to appear — as was repeatedly pointed out by the councilmembers and Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association head Matt Ruben — was a representative from the Office of Property Assessment.
Fault lines in Council unity were on display as members talked to residents about their tax-relief proposals, and heard from people who described property valuations going from $20,000 to up near $1 million. Meanwhile, Council and civic groups are still trying to extract information from the OPA about what exactly the methodology was that OPA used.
Ruben says a coalition of 20 civic groups has banded together to demand that OPA release all of the data it used. "We need to be able to understand the methods they used, and we are demanding that everyone be given 30 to 45 days from when that data is released to the public" to request a first-level review of a property assessment. "How does the average homeowner get the information and expertise to speak intelligently in this [review] meeting with OPA?"
Squilla said Council hasn't been able to extract detailed information from OPA: "During the budget process, when OPA comes in the second day of budget hearings, that's when we get our chance to actually ask them our questions," he said. So far, "all they're telling us is they used square footage, they used comp sales, they used condition of your property and data. We have a lot of questions, you guys have a lot of questions."
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