The mayor declined to offer a timeline for potential changes and said he was not ready to announce publicly what ought to happen.
Any effort would by necessity require at least many months, even a year or more. Restructuring or dissolving the BRT would require changing the City Charter, a lengthy process that culminates in a public vote. The earliest that could happen, one councilman predicted, was next May.
Verna did not attend the news conference, but issued a joint statement with Nutter committing herself to overhauling or disbanding the agency.
Like Nutter's remarks at the news conference, the statement was brief and short on specifics.
But it was notable nonetheless that the city's top two elected officials pledged publicly to remake the BRT. The agency, a bastion of patronage, has successfully resisted reform attempts dating to the 1960s.
BRT spokesman Kevin Feeley again acknowledged that the agency's current property assessments were deeply flawed. But he contended that the inaccurate valuations were being fixed through a new assessment method called the Actual Value Initiative.
"To the mayor's point, we agree that reform of the system is necessary. That's what Actual Value is," Feeley said. "It is probably the most important reform to the property-tax system in the last decade."
Clearly, though, in critiquing the agency's "culture," Nutter was not limiting his calls for reform to assessments.
Behind the scenes, the Nutter administration is exploring how to eliminate the BRT's independence by bringing the agency's assessors into a department overseen by the mayor, such as the Finance Department or the Managing Director's Office.
