Title
Urging the Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT) to adopt a policy of accepting all informal and formal property assessment appeals filed for Tax Year 2025 by March 31, 2025, due to the delay in mailing of property reassessment notices until August 7, 2024.
Body
WHEREAS, Earlier this year, the Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment (OPA) completed a citywide re-assessment of property values for Tax Year 2025 and certified those assessments; and;
WHEREAS, The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that property assessments are rising most rapidly in -certain low-income neighborhoods that are near heavily gentrified areas such as West Philadelphia or in Kingsessing, where the average residential assessment increased by 50% compared to a citywide average of 11% since the last re-assessments in 2022; and
WHEREAS, Philadelphia has a large number of low-income minority homeowners, and preventing the displacement of Black and brown homeowners is a major priority of Philadelphia City Council; and
WHEREAS, Two independent investigations of the 2023 assessments conducted separately by: (i) the Philadelphia Inquirer; and (ii) Community Legal Services (CLS) and Reinvestment Fund both found that, while OPA assessments met industry standards at the citywide level, the 2023 assessments did not consistently satisfy those same standards at the neighborhood level; and
WHEREAS, Those same independent investigations of the 2023 assessments both found that the systemic errors and inaccuracies in the OPA's assessments were more likely to occur in Black and low-income neighborhoods; and it is likely that the same systemic errors and inaccuracies noted in the 2023 assessments have remained and similarly affected the accuracy and uniformity of the 2025 assessments; and
WHEREAS, Pennsylvania law requires certification of Tax Year 2025 assessments by March 31, 2024. See 53 P.S. ? 8565(c) (setting certification deadline); and
WHEREAS, The Philadelphia Code requires that the OPA's ...
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