Full valuation is not the same as a tax hike. In some instances, people will actually get smaller tax bills when and if the Board of Revision of Taxes sets assessment values at market rates.
But full valuation is as close to the third-rail as any politican in this town has ventured voluntarily since Richardson Dilworth's pinstripe suits were still fashionable.
Because, even if only 10 percent of the city's property owners had their tax bills go up as a result of full-valuation assessments, you'd have 50,000 voters looking to nail someone's pelt to their wall.
Way it works now, the Board of Revision of Taxes sets property values for tax purposes at an "assessment ratio" that is one-third of what the BRT thinks the property would sell for in the open market.
It forecasts these values on the basis of comparable sales and other arcane factors, and sends the values to the mayor and City Council. Lawmakers then set a tax rate that gets multiplied by the value to compute the tax bill for that property.
We end up with a system so dysfunctional that a property that sold for $480,000 in Center City last year had a lower tax bill than a property in Northeast Philly that sold last year for $88,500.
The tax-reform group Philadelphia Forward has dozens of similar examples on its Web site, if you're looking for a laugh.
I call this "bull valuation." Everybody from the mayor's office and City Council to the BRT knows that the system is dysfunctional. They all know that poorer neighborhoods bear the brunt of this imbalance.
But nobody wants to own the fix because they know it can't be fixed without raising someone's tax bill. Everybody you ask dodges the issue like an incoming artillery shell.
To his credit, the mayor took it on when we asked him about it in a budget briefing Wednesday.
"Well, actually, I want to do it," he said when someone asked him who would take the lead on this.
