Panel member targets BRT workers on school payroll

As the city school district tries to plug a looming $160 million budget gap, officials have considered trimming alternative high schools and not opening new charter schools.

Not on the block so far: the $4 million the district spends each year to pay patronage workers at the city Board of Revision of Taxes, the agency that sets tax values on all properties in Philadelphia.

Now, one member of the School Reform Commission, the state board that runs city schools, says the district should discuss taking the BRT workers off the school payroll.

"I hope that the district and SRC will take up this issue this month," SRC member Johnny Irizarry wrote in an e-mail, adding that he would raise the question for debate this month. The board has a meeting today.

One schools advocate said her group would push the board to simply cut off funding for the BRT workers.

"It's a direct hit against public education," said Helen Gym, a leader of Parents United for Public Education. "It's a test of what type of leadership we're going to have."

In a season of painful choices, what to do about these 78 BRT workers remains a politically prickly question for the SRC.

For decades, the BRT has had a split payroll: Its 120 city workers cannot be involved in politics. But that ban does not apply to the school positions, which are mostly filled with Democratic and Republican Party workers and their relatives.

These workers are not qualified to assess properties. They file paperwork, answer phones, and handle other duties for the assessors.

Donna Aument, Democratic leader of the 33d Ward and a 27-year BRT employee, said the workers have important duties and should not be condemned because they got their jobs through political connections.

"You want to fire me because I don't do my job, I don't have a complaint," she said, "but you want to fire me because I'm a [political] appointment?"

"We do our job. That's the bottom line."

In May, the school board only budgeted enough money to pay the BRT workers until Sept. 30 and said it would prefer that the workers go under the city payroll - a nudge for Mayor Nutter and City Council to act.

But that seems unlikely anytime soon. Even the Council members who are most fed up with the BRT's inaccurate assessments say that patronage isn't the real problem.

"Whether they are committee people or not, I am sensitive to people being unemployed," said Councilman Frank DiCicco, who is pushing for reforms at BRT.

DiCicco, like other Council members, got his first public job through patronage - at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation when he was 21. BRT should better train its workers, he said, not lay them off.

"The patronage employees become a good scapegoat . . . because they don't have the skills that are necessary to do the job correctly, through no fault of their own," he said yesterday.

Councilman Darrell L. Clarke, the majority whip, said he did not believe in a political ban for any city employees. Further, he said, it's wrong to assume that patronage workers cannot be effective.

Council President Anna C. Verna pledged to address the BRT's problems but declined to comment on the patronage workers.

Charlesretta Meade, the BRT's chairwoman, did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, school officials also have little inclination to cut off the BRT workers without an agreement with City Hall.

"We cannot unilaterally eliminate these positions right now," said Fernando Gallard, a district spokesman.

He said it was proper for the schools to pay some of the costs of assessing property taxes. "Clearly we would like to spend as little as possible," he said.

Unless the SRC changes course, Gallard said, the district will likely shift more money into the BRT payroll account so the paychecks can continue.

The district has made no decisions about where to cut, but a memo prepared during the state budget standoff laid out some painful alternatives: cuts in early-learning centers, cutbacks in school police officers, trimming school nurses, cuts in SEPTA passes.

While some alternative-education programs have already been cut, Gallard said the district would still have twice as many spots in those programs as it had last year.

Gym is unsympathetic to the argument that the BRT workers are vital to the schools.

"In a situation like this, I think the political nature of the SRC becomes evident," she said.