Editorial: Do actual collecting

If you voted yesterday, you get a gold star for citizenship. If you didn’t vote, shame on you. Blame the guy in the mirror if you get the government you didn’t vote for.
Now it’s time for Philadelphians to focus on an issue of equal, and maybe even greater, importance: The city’s very broken property-tax system. After years of delay and cowardice by elected officials, the city is finally trying to institute reform by taxing properties at a percentage of what they are actually worth.
The plan is called the Actual Value Initiative, and while it’s long overdue, it should not go into effect until Philadelphia gets its fiscal house in order by eliminating waste, maximizing municipal employees’ productivity, and finding cheaper ways to deliver city services, including privatizing trash collection by giving the job to the qualified lowest bidder and requiring the winner to retain the current workforce.
Under no circumstances should Philadelphia residents or merchants allow the city government to collect another dime in property taxes until it gets its act together and collects back taxes. That means Mayor Michael “I’ll Reform City Government” Nutter must instruct the commissioners of the Departments of Revenue and Licenses & Inspections to get together with the city solicitor, who runs the Law Department, to crack down, IMMEDIATELY, on tax deadbeats.
“Philadelphia has over $500 million in delinquent property taxes but no new plan and very little discussion about how to collect what is alreadly owed. We’re also still waiting for the revenue numbers from the reassessment to come in,” says Northeast Philly state Sen. Michael Stack. “These are the issues we need to tackle before we talk about AVI and city property taxes.”
Amen.
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