"This is not an efficient arrangement," Archie said, responding by e-mail to questions from The Inquirer about the long-standing arrangement.
If the schools must continue to help pay for the BRT, he said, a better way would be to turn over the money to the city directly, and put all the workers on the city payroll, where they would be barred from engaging in politics.
An Inquirer series found that at least three dozen of the BRT jobs are filled with precinct workers or their relatives, referred by Rep. Robert A. Brady, the city Democratic chairman, or Republican leader Michael Meehan.
Schools Superintendent Arlene Ackerman said in an interview after a School Reform Commission meeting that the presence of BRT patronage workers on her payroll was "a very complicated political issue" that needed to be ironed out by the SRC and the mayor.
Ackerman said that in every city she had ever lived in, tax assessors were always paid by the municipal government.
"I've come to find that there's Philadelphia, and then there's other cities," she said.
The statements by Archie and Ackerman came on the same day that the Committee of Seventy, a civic watchdog, called for immediate changes to the BRT, including an end to the schools paying for patronage workers.
The committee said the time to push through changes was now, when public anger is fresh over the Inquirer series detailing the BRT's political hiring, private dealmaking, and mismanagement.
"There's probably more interest in changing this than anything I've seen in a long time," said Zack Stalberg, the committee's president, adding that the newspaper's reports had ignited widespread outrage - "even among the politicians."
The BRT is an independent agency run by a seven-member board appointed by city judges. Board members have long been political insiders.
