BRT defends self, blames Council, Nutter administration
The six members of the beleaguered Board of Revision of Taxes defended their management of the agency, the role of patronage in its operations, and the performance of their employees at a hearing yesterday.
Aggrieved and defiant, the board members faulted City Council and the Nutter administration for Philadelphia's inequitable and inaccurate property-tax-assessment system, and said The Inquirer and the good-government watchdog Committee of Seventy had unfairly tarnished their reputations.
No action was taken at the hearing, ostensibly called so the board could consider formally ceding control of property assessments to the Nutter administration. Now, a vote is not expected for about a week.
Instead, the 50-minute hearing served largely as a venting session for the BRT, whose chairwoman likened recent criticism of the agency to a "mob scene."
"I want you to know that I take umbrage and offense," BRT Chair Charlesretta Meade told Ellen Kaplan, vice president and policy director of the Committee of Seventy, who had come to urge the agency to do what it could to repair its damaged image.
At various points during the hearing, Meade said she was "insulted," angered by the "public flogging" she had taken, and disturbed by the "vicious and wrong" attacks to which she said BRT employees had been subjected.
Meade's sentiments were echoed by several other board members.
"It is my honor that is at stake here. I will not let it be tarnished," member James Thomas Dintino said after Kaplan's remarks.
Board member Alan K. Silberstein used the occasion to defend the role of the agency's 80 patronage workers, who are funded by the School District and thus exempt from city civil service regulations, which include a ban on political activity.
As is often the case in the private sector, Silberstein said, patronage workers get their jobs by dint of their relationships and connections. "That's the way things work. It doesn't make it wrong," he said.
Taken together, the board members' comments constituted the agency's broadest public defense of its actions in the months since May, when an Inquirer series documented chronic mismanagement, ethical shortcomings, and wildly inaccurate property valuations at the BRT.
Yesterday, board members said they had long had an unswerving commitment to make the city's property-assessment system accurate and equitable. They also said that accurate numbers were not available yet because of City Council's political interference and a lack of funding from the Nutter administration.
Years and millions of dollars in the making, the BRT's Actual Value Initiative is supposed to restore public faith in property assessments by generating fair and realistic valuations.
While the BRT has not finished work on its new assessments, The Inquirer has found serious and systemic errors in early releases of Actual Value figures, and the Nutter administration has predicted it could take up to two years to fix flaws in Actual Value data.
It was unclear yesterday whether anger led BRT members to reconsider their decision to yield control of property assessments to the Nutter administration.
On Oct. 7, all six BRT members signed a memorandum of understanding that made city Finance Director Rob Dubow the new interim executive director of the BRT. But that deal - reached in a backroom meeting out of public view - violated the state Sunshine Act, according to City Solicitor Shelley R. Smith.
To avoid the possibility of legal challenge, the agency scheduled yesterday's session, and the expectation was that the memorandum would be quickly ratified.
So far, though, no final vote on the memorandum has been scheduled. After yesterday's hearing, BRT member Robert Nix said a vote could come in about in a week.
"It's a bit of a strange situation. We're working with them already, but I think the nuance for us is that we're waiting for this to be ratified before making any policy moves or any steps of major importance," Dubow said.
When asked whether the Nutter administration had sought to punish the BRT by cutting its funding - as Meade implied during the hearing - Dubow said the agency had simply been hurt by the same spending reductions and freezes that had hit all city departments during the economic crisis.
City Council members interviewed yesterday were split on whether they shared responsibility for keeping the tax-assessment status quo in place.
Councilwoman Jannie L. Blackwell, who has long opposed the Actual Value Initiative, said that Council has been rightly skeptical of new assessments, even if they turn out to be more accurate than the old ones.
"If we haven't made a change in all these years, then I don't think the city will fold if we don't change now," Blackwell said. "I'm saying, let's hold up and revisit it all another time."
Other Council members, though, said the BRT, not Council, bore responsibility.
"To blame Council for the inaccurate assessments is utterly ridiculous. We don't work at the BRT. We aren't the ones who have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a system that for four years they have been telling us is six months away from being finished," said Councilman Frank DiCicco. "How do we get blamed for something that they control?"
Regardless of whether the BRT formally adopts the memorandum, City Council appears likely to pass legislation that would, if voters approve in May, permanently disband or restructure the BRT.
Contact staff writer Patrick Kerkstra at 215-854-2827 or pkerkstra@phillynews.com.
