Once property-tax reassessments are completed this year, Philadelphians will end up paying out an estimated
$90 million more altogether.
Mayor Michael Nutter, who insists the fix to the city's arbitrary assessment system is not a tax hike,
conceded in last week's budget address that it “isn't the easiest, most popular reform that we could have taken on.” But it might not be the hardest. After all, wealthy nonprofits like the
University of Pennsylvania will pay somewhere between little and nothing to the city this year ― and Nutter, despite Philly’s desperate financial straits, seems content to let them do so. Many universities contribute what are called payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, to their host cities: Baltimore, in recent years, received $5.4 million annually from PILOTs, Boston $17.4 million. Not in Philly. Here, nonprofits contributed a piddling $420,223 in 2010, $496,810.40 in 2011. “That is rather low,” says
Daphne Kenyon,a Visiting Fellow at
Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and author of a
report on PILOTs. “We were aware that the heyday for PILOTs in Pennsylvania appeared to be from the mid 1980s to the mid '90s. But we did not realize that for Philly it was only $420,000. Oh my goodness.” Oh my goodness indeed: None of the city’s wealthiest nonprofits ―
Penn, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital ― donates anything. Zero. Nothing. The largest donor by far was, God bless them,
Cathedral Village retirement community in Roxborough, which paid $272,500 last year.
Penn and
Columbia are the only Ivy League schools to pay nothing in PILOTs: in recent years,
Harvard has paid $8.7 million,
Dartmouth $3.1 million. This year,
Yale alone will pay New Haven about $8.1 million.
[Read More...]