In case you thought patronage and cronyism were the only problems at the city Board of Revision of Taxes, the BRT has served notice that it also suffers from incompetence.
When last we visited the agency that sets Philadelphia property values, the political hacks who run the place were promising to reform it from within.
No, seriously - that's what they promised last spring, when The Inquirer reported widespread inequities in property assessments and favoritism at the board.
Since then, the BRT has been busy reassessing the city's 25,000 commercial properties. Judging from the preliminary results, the process involved a blindfold and a dartboard.
As staff writers Mark Fazlollah, Joseph Tanfani, and Dylan Purcell reported on Sunday, the proposed "full-value" assessments contain scores of errors.
The value of a broken-down warehouse and vacant lot in West Philadelphia soared from $216,000 to $3.9 million. A lot at Seventh and Arch Streets is valued at $5.2 million, except for one problem - the lot doesn't exist.
We could go on, and why not? A parking lot in Frankford is valued at $140 per square foot, more expensive than some lots in Center City. In Port Richmond, a 35-acre tract owned by a Houston company had its proposed value drop 64 percent due to a probable data-entry error at the BRT.
In what we hope is a remarkable coincidence, many commercial properties that hadn't been reassessed since 1989 rose exactly 40 percent in value, regardless of their location. Other properties that were last reassessed about 10 years ago went up exactly 20 percent. It suggests that the BRT, in many cases, never got off its collective butt to look at the properties in question.
Or perhaps the BRT was in such a rush to turn in its homework and tamp down a political firestorm that it simply threw arbitrary numbers against a wall. Either way, the result does not inspire confidence among the taxpaying public.
This review isn't finished, and there is still time to correct the mistakes. The new assessments won't take effect until 2011 at the earliest.
But the initial results should only deepen the concern of taxpayers about the system's basic fairness. Errors that cause commercial properties to be assessed too high are likely to be fixed, but valuations that are too low probably won't be challenged. That could place more of an overall tax burden on homeowners.
Beyond fixing these mistakes, however, there is still the urgent challenge of fixing the BRT. Mayor Nutter, whose authority over the agency is limited, asked for board members to resign last spring but was rebuffed. Executive Director Enrico Foglia resigned this month, but the problems are systemic.
City Council talked about reforming the BRT, but then Council members remembered it was time for summer vacation.
Until city leaders get serious about overhauling the BRT, Philadelphians won't have confidence that there is any rhyme or reason to their property-tax bills.
