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Archive: February, 2013
This morning, City Councilwoman Maria Quninones-Sanchez quietly and without speechifying, offered what may be a solution to one of the central problems created by the Actual Value Initiative, the city's property-tax reform effort. The problem: An estimated $200 million of the tax burden is being shifted from large commercial properties to residential ones, while small businesses are also in many cases expecting to see their taxes skyrocket. Sanchez's solution: Put some of that burden back onto the large commercial properties by way of the Use & Occupancy (U&O) tax, which is applied to commercial tenants, and let the city keep some of that money to use for tax relief for the rest of us.
U&O is calculated based on property valuations, and under the new property assessments, the roughly $100 million annual take is expected to double. The thinking had previously been that the U&O rate would probably have to be reduced — even cut in half. Instead, Sanchez's plan is to keep the rate intact at 5.51 percent, but to waive the first $2,000 of that tax. Given that the median U&O bill is just $664, but the average U&O bill is $6,000, it's clear that the vast majority of businesses would have to pay no U&O tax at all. However, large properties, the ones that would have received a windfall tax reduction under AVI, will end up paying something closer to what they've been paying to do business in Philly all along.
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Political operative John D. McDaniel's ongoing Philadelphia Board of Ethics saga has centered on Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown's troubling campaign finance practices and wasteful political patronage in the Nutter administration. McDaniel had been Brown's campaign manager, held apparently sole control over a political action committee and held a well-paying job at the airport provided by the mayor himself. Now there's a new twist: McDaniel's Progressive Agenda PAC also funneled $5,900 from Students First PAC, a Pennsylvania group backed by Bala Cynwyd hedge fund managers and wealthy national school voucher advocates, to state House candidate Fatimah Muhammad's 2012 campaign, which was heavily supported by voucher proponents.
McDaniel's transfer of funds, detailed in an Ethics Board settlement released on Monday, was a violation of Philadelphia's Home Rule Charter. But Students First PAC (not to be confused with the ideologically related Michelle Rhee group StudentsFirst) may have also violated state campaign finance law.
"You may not direct another person to give money on your behalf," says Barry Kauffman, director of watchdog Pennsylvania Common Cause. Kauffman points to Section 1634(a) of the state election code, which states that it is "unlawful for any person to make any contribution with funds designated or given to him for the purpose by any other person, firm or corporation. Each person making a contribution shall do so only in his own name."
In January, we told you about Melissa Frost, whose West Philly house was taken over by a self-described Hurricane Sandy evacuee who, after terrorizing Frost and trashing her house, refused to leave. The good news, for Frost, is that she's back in the house. The bad news: It was kind of a mess. Artwork was vandalized, toilets were defiled in ways that we won't even mention here, doors were kicked in and pipes were broken. Check out her Tumblr page for her update and some photos of what she found.
Photo: Neal Santos
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.
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East/West facade. Image from the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. |
Straddling the Schuylkill River between Market and Chestnut Streets -- This proposal is insane now and was even more insane in 1910. It's hard to believe that the idea of a Convention Hall built over a river would EVER be taken seriously, but here we have one that was designed down to the last stitch in a time period where a project like this would seem nearly impossible.
On Thursday, Councilman Mark Squilla will introduce the latest of many proposals for easing the transition to new, market-based property tax assessments known as the Actual Value Initiative or AVI. Squilla wants to phase in the new values over four years, so that those seeing increases will see their taxes grow more gradually (and those now overpaying would also see their bills shrink a bit more slowly). Squilla says he believes there's some support from this idea from the administration and City Council.
"If your property went up 500 percent or 600 percent, it would take you four years to get to that level," he says. "I don't think it's fair to do that over one year. First of all, the four years would give [the Office of Property Assessments] a chance to get all the data right, and it would slow down the shift [of the property tax burden] from commercial to residential" property owners. Because commercial owners had been paying closer to actual property values, it's expected that their share of the property tax burden will decrease, and an estimated $200 million more would be paid by residents.
He points out that the city has delayed the reassessments for years, and now expects residents to pay. "Because of the city's mistakes, we can't expect these people to make up in one year for all of their mistakes."
Talk of so-called smoothing measures was popular early last budget season, but quieted down as City Council members focused on the homestead exemption, which gives a break to all owner-occupants, and on relief for longtime residents in gentrified neighborhoods. Each relief measure put in place is estimated to raise the overall tax rate by a tenth of a percent. Squilla says he now likes the idea of a combination of a $15,000 homestead exemption (rather than the $30,000 Council voted for last year) and a gentrification protection measure, which he thinks together could have just a tenth of a percent's impact on the tax rate. He also says he'll be scrutinizing the budget for cuts to reduce the tax rate, and trying to push the administration to include $100 million in delinquent property-tax collections in its budget, a tall order in a city with around $500 million in delinquent taxes on its books.
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Last week at City Council, as Councilman Kenyatta Johnson got some media attention for jumping into the fray over AVI, another resolution he had sponsored was passed virtually unnoticed. The legislation would enable the Second District Councilman to steer $2.2 million in leftover Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) dollars toward renovating vacant city-owned structures in the Point Breeze neighborhood.
The move is indicative of a new strategy for Johnson, who caught flak from developers and constituents last year for pushing forward a plan to have the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) seize 17 privately held lots for development into affordable housing in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. That move was described as an effort to consolidate the lots with city-owned lots to allow for larger-scale development to take place.
The action spurred intense criticism from the public, led by developer/neighborhood gadfly Ori Feibush, who alleged that privately held properties were being condemned in spite of active plans for redevelopment. The affair aroused wider criticism of land-use policy due to the condition of the 311 properties the city already owns in the vicinity, many of which are ill maintained and have sat unused for years.
Click for map of proposed rehabs. »
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Charles M Gibbs, Esq., the attorney who represented patronage employee and Blondell Reynolds Brown campaign manager John McDaniel — who admitted to stealing from a PAC he ran and from Brown's campaign — has a history of serving the city's political class during its legal tribulations. An attorney with the politically connected Bowman & Partners LLP since graduating from the Widener University School of Law in 2010, Gibbs also, unsurprisingly, has a long history of personally rubbing elbows with powerbrokers in Philadelphia.
In addition to representing McDaniel during his guilty plea, Gibbs in 2011 also presented himself as former Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller's attorney while her office was being raided for evidence related to alleged ethics violations, according to news archives. Two of Miller's staffers were ultimately fined for conducting political activities within her office.
A couple of Easton Area School District (EASD) middle school students, Kayla Martinez and Brianna Hawk, made national news in 2010 when their school banned breast-cancer-awareness bracelets bearing the phrase “I ♥ Boobies! (Keep A Breast),” sold for $4 each by the Keep A Breast Foundation. Today, their case was before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, after Judge Mary McLaughlin of the federal district court issued an injunction against the ban.
American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania represented the girls, seeking an emergency injunction and an end to the girls' punishment, which includes barring them from extracurriculars.
Mary Catherine Roper of the ACLU told the court that the students' freedom of speech had been violated, and that the school district appeared to be manufacturing a sexual meaning to rationalize its ban on something with which administrators were uncomfortable. John Freund, attorney for the school district, said the issue was not "viewpoint discrimination" but rather "a dress-code violation." He said schools need to be able to preserve "the civility of discourse in the classroom," and that a ruling against the district opens the school to a flood of "cause-based marketing laced with sexual double entendres."
This, in turn, led to a frank discussion of "boobies," of the likes not often seen in a courthouse.
Whether "I ♥ Boobies!" is even a double entendre was a matter of some discussion. One judge queried Freund, "Where is the double entendre? Boobies are breasts." He added that the students appeared to be "trying to get us to the point of intelligent discourse" on the importance of breast self-exams. And given that the school was in fact marking breast-cancer awareness day, another judge added, "If breasts are not a problem, what makes boobies a big problem?"
Freund indicated that there might be a slippery slope attached to allowing such messaging. "This case is simply trying to avoid throwing a match into a cauldron of boiling hormones."
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John Baer dedicated today's Daily News state politics column to praising Kahlil Byrd, the president of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst education reform group and past CEO of something you've never heard of called Americans Elect. (A copy editor apparently missed that "StudentsFirst" does not, contrary to English grammar norms, put a space between what appear to be two words)
As Baer notes, Byrd markets himself to Daily News readers as a master of "disruptive politics" — of an independent, nonpartisan variety. But, as I reported at Salon last year, the vast majority of candidates that the pro-charter and union-busting outfit supports are, surprise, Republicans. StudentsFirst's donors include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hedge fund managers, and the Walton Family Foundation. In Pennsylvania, StudentsFirst hired Ashley DeMauro, former Department of Education government relations chief under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
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