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Archive: February, 2013
Six City Council members called for separate hearings today to dig into Philly's half-billion-dollar delinquent tax-collection problem, which Mayor Nutter recently announced a new plan to address through more aggressive collections and outreach and through a $25 million new software program to improve the data the Revenue Department can track.
Each of last year's "serious six" freshman City Council members introduced his or her own resolution on the matter, collectively called the "Taxpayer Fairness Initiative."
"As a body of freshman Council members, we began talking about this last year in terms of addressing this serious issue in a meaningful way," Councilman David Oh said. "It is not fair that not everyone is paying their taxes. A lax process for collecting taxes has only perpetuated the problem, and its effect reaches every neighborhood in our city. The fact that a half-billion dollars is owed to the city is very disheartening."
Gov. Tom Corbett's budget proposal may not have included much very good news for people in Pennsylvania, who learned, for example, of his plan for minimal increases to education funding that was cut deep in the past few years. But it did offer plenty to large companies doing business in the commonwealth, including proposed reductions of some corporate taxes and repeals of others.
One thing Corbett's budget didn't address: Closing up tax loopholes. A new report by PennPIRG finds that loopholes allowing for offshore tax dodging cost Pennsylvania $2.1 billion in 2012. Pennsylvania lost the fifth-largest amount in the nation through such tax havens, after California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois. The federal government also loses out on around $150 billion in taxes each year thanks to such tax havens, the report found. Pennsylvania also loses out on taxes from companies registered in Delaware, where lax rules have allowed companies to avoid paying various state taxes totaling $9.5 billion in the last decade, according to a New York Times report.
The state's biggest tax-dodgers, per the report: Comcast, GMAC and Sunoco, which together have 10 subsidiaries registered elsewhere. Incidentally (or not), these are some of the same companies that have benefited from the Pennsylvania's largess, including $25 million for Sunoco's refinery overhaul and expansion, and $60 million-plus for Comcast, including credits, grants and subsidies for building its Center City tower.
City Council will get a briefing on more detailed property-tax-assessment numbers today, the first close-up look most have gotten beyond the broad-stroke figures released by Mayor Nutter in December as part of an effort to get assessments closer to their real values (aka the Actual Value Initiative or AVI). Council President Darrell Clarke's office has already received a full breakdown of the assessments of city properties, details of which will be going out to property owners Feb. 15.
One Council staffer said a preliminary peek at the numbers had revealed some assessment oddities in certain neighborhoods, where homes appeared to the staffer to be undervalued by more than 50 percent. However, since assessments were done based on the exteriors of homes, and since finding comparable properties can be difficult in some neighborhoods where property values change drastically from block to block, that's perhaps to be expected.
A more pertinent question is what Council will do when it gets a look at those values. Most importantly for homeowners: Will Council members rally around the idea of a homestead exemption once the numbers are in front of them?
Counciman Bill Green, for one, is against it. He says the lowest possible millage rate will be the way to go. As the law now stands, he says, "AVI will take effect and the rate will be 1.39 percent, based on the current number of people who are taking homestead exemptions. … The only way to lower the rate and collect the same amount of money is to change the relief measures."
Despite Gov. Corbett's indications that he would not continue cuts to education and social services in this year's budget address, Democrats were none too pleased with the priorities he outlined before a joint sesion of the General Assembly today. Lancaster County Democrat Rep. Mike Sturla called it the worst-received budget address he'd ever seen. In particular, the governor's announcement that he did not see a way to proceed with the Medicaid expansion outlined in the Affordable Care Act drew backlash from Philly lawmakers.
Corbett said he would:
• put "a record amount of state funding into basic education, $5.5 billion dollars, starting with early childhood programs and going all the way through grade 12."
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Mayor Michael Nutter unveiled an aggressive new strategy yesterday to crack down on property tax deadbeats. The latest announcement in a string of pledges to collect on the city's estimated half-billion-dollar backlog of uncollected taxes was peppered with slang and Nutter's patented mild swearing, to indicate that he's really, actually serious this time. For real.
Said the Mayor, "Now there are some other trifling, raggedy people around here who can actually pay, who don't pay. We're going to chase their little asses down as hard as possible."
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena around Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
600 Block of Schuylkill Ave. -- Hopefully this lot is only temporary. While I've informed you about empty lots that have been empty for over 80 years, this one is only about two years old. That shit doesn't matter. This lot still has no damn excuse to exist and there's a possibility that this patch of dog dung may last for decades to come.
This pile of dirt started its development life as ... a pile of dirt. In the 1860s, this lot consisted of three piers that stuck out into the Schuylkill. A few little buildings dotted the site, which was bounded by the diagonal corner of Sutherland (now Schuylkill) Avenue and a pre-South Street Bridge South Street that ran west of Chippewa (now 27th) Street.
Things changed for the site of the lot in the late 1880s, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad constructed the Schuylkill River East Side Railroad on some landfill along the east side of the river (hence the name). This extended the land on the lot as far out into the river as the old piers used to be. In 1895, the Electric Traction Company, a short-lived trolley operator, ran six electrical cables under the Schuylkill that came back above ground on the site of this lot. These lines would power the company's South and Lombard Street trolley loop. A small building that housed the emergence of these cables was built on the site. Another empty lot, the parking lot of the fancy-ass Philadelphia School on the 2500 block of Lombard, is all that remains of the Trolley Car Repair House that supported the same trolley route.
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| This 40-plus-year-old parking zoo is a second cousin to the South Street Bridge Lot. |
Gov. Corbett will give his annual budget address later this morning, and protesters from Philly and elsewhere in the state will be at the capitol to greet him. Fight for Philly is among those who'll be there to demand more funding for education and social programs, and an end to gifts to big business like the so-called Delaware loophole that allows corporations to avoid paying Pennsylvania hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Decarcerate PA will be protesting ongoing investments in prisons, which include twin facilities to replace Graterford.
After two years of painful budget cuts, Corbett has already signaled that more austere cuts will likely not be on the menu: he'll hold steady on higher-ed funding, perhaps increase funding for education, and will invest $20 million toward getting 1,200 people with intellectual disabilities off our 15,000-person-long waiting list for services, which includes 3,500 people considered to be in "emergency" status. It's not clear whether he'll speak to the state's Medicaid expansion.
Mayor Nutter today announced a $40 million plan he expects will bring in $260 million more in taxes by 2018, by combining a more aggressive collections strategy with more outreach and a new "data warehouse," a set of analytical tools that will be used to identify should-be taxpayers and track what types of collection efforts work most effectively.
Philly currently has a 91 percent collection rate when it comes to property taxes, but was owed $518 million in delinquent real estate taxes by the end of the 2012 fiscal year. Nutter described a "new aggressive multifaceted delinquent tax collection strategy" to include a new tax software system and a call center with 55 new employees, which together will cost $40 million and take a few years to put in place. He said the last time the city Revenue Department received a major software upgrade was in 1993. The new software would integrate data from other agencies, identifying individuals who pay other taxes, such as federal taxes, but don't pay what they owe to the city.
"We want to be much higher up on your list of priorities," he said.
Councilman Brian O'Neill confirmed that he will roll back his proposal to prevent multifamily dwellings from being built in commercial-zoned areas of the city. The plan had been wrapped up in a controversial bill that originally would have prohibited or limited everything from take-out food to dry-cleaners to art studios to farmers' markets and gardens in such neighborhoods, and that has been amended several times already. Complaints from the administration and the building industry led to the latest amendment.
O'Neill told CP via email: "I will be amending the multifamily residential in CMX2 to allow greater density and to prohibit residential in the front of the ground floor. I am currently meeting with and discussing same with representatives of the administration. Our discussions have been very positive and I am hopeful that we will reach an agreed upon compromise in the next week or two."
It seems that other restrictions in the bill, such as prohibitions on personal-care homes and group homes, may remain.
For community and parent groups looking for a deus ex machina to stop controversial school closures in their tracks, State Sen. Shirley Kitchen is ready to step in. The Senator has proposed legislation to suspend the School Reform Commission's authority to close or merge schools through June 30, 2014.
Kitchen, a Philly Democrat, said in a statement. “The superintendent's plan came as a shock to many families and school district employees across the city. Now, families are scrambling to figure out how their children will safely get to their new schools, and teachers and staff are worried about their jobs. Many of these schools are in close-knit communities where families and staff alike care deeply about the education of our children, and it’s shameful that they were blindsided by the closures. … We want to make sure that this plan has been thoroughly examined so that we can explore any alternatives that will not disrupt our children’s education and will sustain jobs. My bill will allow more time to ensure that a solid plan for the future of our school district is in place.”
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