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One of the taxes that deserves our immediate attention is the Property Tax. There is rampant unfairness in the current system with some Philadelphians paying 2 or 3 times what their neighbors down the block pay.
Why?
Because the values the City uses to tax us have deteriorated with time and now bear little resemblence to the true value of our homes. Normally counties perform a county wide revaluation every 10-20 years where every house gets looked at a new. When was the last revaluation done in Philadelphia?
I don't know, but it appears to have been some time ago. When I asked one of my sources, he laughed and said "1682"
In Philadelphia the city agency responsible for assigning a value to our homes and thus how much tax we will pay is the BRT. While the BRT has made a heroic effort to keep their market values up-to-date, they can't keep up: with only 200 employees there is no way they can accurately assess each and every one of the 560,000 properties in Philadelphia.
So they do the best they can: they lump everybody in a neighborhood into the same basket and calculate an average increase. Oh, they gussy it up a bit--calculate averages based on housing type, but don't be fooled. They don't calculate your increase after reassessing your house from the ground up. Rather, everybody in the neighborhood gets the same average increase. If your house appreciated less than the neighborhood average, tough. You can always appeal and by the way--it is up to you to show that the BRT's assessment is wrong, not the other way round.
Now imagine what happens over the years: the small errors which result from mass appraisal accumulate and before you know it the BRT thinks your house is worth a whole lot more than it is. Meanwhile you've been paying too much property tax all these years.
What Philadelphia needs is a city wide revaluation, a new baseline, and not the band aid solutions like mass reappraisal.
Philadelphia is long overdue for a city wide reassessment.
Ed Goppelt
Webmaster@Hallwatch.org