Budget hearings continued today with more pointed questions from City Council members about Mayor Nutter's plan to move to a property tax system that uses market values, collecting an additional $90 million in the process.
Councilman Bill Green went several rounds with Finance Director Rob Dubow about the move to what is known as the "Actual Value Initiative." Critics say that because the administration wants to bring in additional revenues, they are seeking a tax hike, while the administration insists they are just capturing the rise in real estate values.
Green noted that when Dubow was executive director of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, which oversees the city budget, he authored a report which said any shift to AVI should be revenue neutral to avoid public opposition. (You can read the report here.)
Here's the exchange:
GREEN: When you were at PICA, PICA wrote a report that said that if we do AVI it should be on a completely revenue neutral basis so that people can't make the kinds of argument that Councilman Kenney just made. Can you tell us how your thinking has evolved on this issue since you wrote that report at PICA?
DUBOW: I think the big difference that we've gone a number of years without doing the full assessment, I think back then we didn't really think it it wouldn't take until 2012 to get to AVI. So I think there's a different set of facts from the facts that were existing then.
GREEN: The premise was simple though . It's you collect the same amount of revenue one year to the next, then the public can't complain that we're hiding anything. That was the premise of the PICA report, not a fairness issue or whether or not the city's moratorium, that it imposed itself, has caused this problem orother things.
DUBOW: I'm not really talking about the moratorium. I'm talking about not having a full assessment in 8 years, an accurate assessment in who knows how long. I think that makes a significant change when you've gone that amount of time without doing a broad assessment .
GREEN: I don't understand how that addresses the premise of what was in the PICA report., which is if you do it on a revenue neutral basis, people won't complain that it's a tax increase. It will be easier to do. That's still a true statement, isn't it?
DUBOW: Your question was how my thinking changed. That's what I'm answering.
GREEN: Is it still a true statement, the statement that was in the PICA report, that moving to a fairer tax system, like through AVI, will be easier if we collected the same amount of revenue one year to the next.
DUBOW: Probably the less revenue collected, the easier it would be for people.