Some members vowed to oppose the BRT's plan to adopt new assessment values with all their might, while others warned of inevitable lawsuits if the BRT fails to enact the new assessments.
Relations between the independent BRT and City Council have long been touchy.
In theory, it is the agency's job to set assessments for all properties in the city, and Council's job to set the property-tax rate.
For well over a decade, though, both sides have failed to live up to those basic obligations.
BRT itself acknowledges that its old values are inaccurate, inequitable, and baffling.
Council, meanwhile, has not adjusted the property-tax rate in 18 years. Instead, it has let BRT's steadily increasing assessments of homes and businesses plump up city revenues. The practice is akin to a back-door tax increase, one that has let Council avoid the political heat that comes with routinely adjusting the tax rate, as is regularly done in counties and cities across the country.
Last week, the BRT took a step that should eventually end that tradition.
The agency released new assessments for 577,000 properties citywide. The tentative values, which differ dramatically from the ones now in use, were developed using sophisticated computer models. Although there are still clearly problems with the figures, they do appear more accurate than the old ones.
Just as important, the new system gives the BRT the ability to reassess every property in the city each year, which will force Council to regularly adjust the tax rate.
Council, though, is in no mood to trust that the BRT got it right.
Early in the hearing, for instance, Councilman Curtis Jones Jr. asked if the agency's policy of permitting its evaluators to moonlight as private appraisers posed conflict-of-interest problems.
