Aye. The ayes are 17; the nays are zero. The bill passes. Mr. Decker, any other resolutions or bills?
A resolution congratulating Autumn Adkins Graves for her contributions and services to Girard College and to the City of Philadelphia, introduced by Councilwoman Brown.
Thank you, Mr. President. I move for the adoption. (Duly seconded.)
Moved and properly seconded. Those in favor? (Aye.)
The ayes have it. The resolution is adopted. 5/10/12 - STATED - 2ND READING
And a resolution recognizing and honoring the 63 outstanding Philadelphia public school teachers, recipients of the Lindback Award for Distinguished High School Teachers for excellence and in particular the seven recipients from schools located in the 4th Council District during National Teacher Appreciation Week, introduced by Councilman Jones.
Thank you, Mr. President. I move for the adoption. (Duly seconded.)
Been moved and properly seconded. Those in favor? (Aye.)
The ayes have it. The resolution is adopted. 5/10/12 - STATED - 2ND READING
And a resolution authorizing Council's Committee on Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs to hold public hearings for applicants seeking nomination to serve on the Commission on Parks and Recreation, and further authorizing the Committee to recommend for Council's consideration nominations to be forwarded to the Mayor, introduced by Councilman Jones for Council President Clarke.
Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilman Jones.
On your behalf, Mr. President, I move for the adoption. (Duly seconded.)
Moved and properly seconded. Those in favor? (Aye.)
There are no other resolutions on the Calendar, Mr. President.
Thank you so much. That completes our Calendar for today. Are there any speeches on the part of the minority? Are there -- I'm sorry. The Chair recognizes Councilman Oh.
Thank you very much, Mr. President. It's not a speech, but just an announcement that's a little late, but if there is any of my colleagues or anyone else who will be available tonight at 6:30, I've been asked to be a celebrity bartender, although I'm not a good bartender, at Katie O'Donnell's at 4501 Woodhaven Road, the Franklin Mills Mall right next to Raymour and Flanigan. The charity that I'll be raising for is the Firefighters Local 22 Widows Fund, and we'll be selling T-shirts and other things to make a contribution. So come by, have a beer, and it will be for a good cause. Thank you.
Thank you, Councilman. Any speeches on the part of the majority? The Chair recognizes Councilman Jones.
We've been to school all week. I mean, we've had hearings, marathon hearings, about education. So, therefore, at the end of the speech of the majority, there will be state officials have been feeding Philadelphians promises for years and decades about achievement and accountability, and each year they request funds. So let's do a history lesson. So let's go back to Constance Clayton, who said her theme was Save the Children. Let's examine Hornbeck, who said they would have Children Achieving. Vallas said Balanced Budgets, and more recently, Dr. Ackerman said Imagine 2014. The five promises within that 2014 vision was that students would have success, quality choices, great staff, accountable adults and a world-class operation. But here we are approaching 2012 and '13 fiscal years budget with shortfalls, failing schools, decreasing staff, continued violence in the classroom. So what happened to all of these superintendents' goals? Did we throw the babies out with the bath water change happened? What happened to the promise of return on our investment of this body that we make annually to the School Reform Commission now and the tomorrows that they promised us for our young people? As we discuss the impact of the budget shortfalls within the School District and attempt to come up with creative solutions, it is important to consider how these decisions impact public safety and well-being. So now a sociology lesson. According to the Inquirer special on school violence 2010, on average, 25 students, teachers and staff were beaten, robbed or sexually assaulted within our school properties, and yet we lay off 91 police officers, giving them pink slips in February, along with 100 nurses and another 100 people that guard the hallways. So let's do a health lesson. Let's go to class on that. They're programs, and in those summer programs, there is a feeding component for poor people that some of whom is the only nutritious meal they will get all day. I listened to last night, when Councilwoman Blackwell held her hearings, a young lady, Ms. Hunt from Local 634, school cafeteria employees and the aides, and she said that she watches young people have their one nutritious meal, hang around the counters until after the serving is done in order to take some of the scraps and leftovers and put them in their bookbag to take to their siblings at home. This is the greatest nation in the world. We should not have our young people surviving on what we do and then talk about cutting even that. So as a health lesson, we need to take a look at that. As a research and science lesson, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, stressed that the most do to improve education is to give young people more of it. In most industrial nations, you have ten-hour, 12-hour school days. We're not talking about increasing that; we're talking about taking away from that. We should be trying to figure out ways to expand after-school programs and give our young people even more incentive to learn, even within our budget. The SRC consists of primarily new appointees, faces that we've just become accustomed to. They have an extraordinary task dealing with the budget. The incentives are to launch new programs and do more with less, but the truth be told is that they want us to invest $94 million, $94 million to get more promises that we have no accountability for. Once again, like previous years, the accountability question has to come together. Math lesson: And we've got -we went to school this week, that we Merion it costs $26,571 to educate a young person. In Radnor, that figure is $19,000. In Lehigh where we went to look at their industrial school, $15,000. And in Philadelphia, we only spend $13,000.
The state must help us do the heavy lifting of this $94 million shortfall that we have to come up with for the $300 million shortfall that the School Board faces. And just yesterday, Governor Corbett helped us with our math. He helped us. Yes, he did. He found that he is willing to look at a cap of $500 million, that he's willing to look at a whole plethora of things, including social issues that face us, and out of that, we may receive the whopping sum of $11 million toward public education. Well, that's like me telling my daughter who came to me at the dinner table, Pop, I'm a little light with the rent, I need $300, and I put out $11 on the table and say, Good luck with that. That's a math add up. In our communications class that we took this week, you know what we learned? We learned that from the testimony of the PFT to the SRC, that they're not talking to each other, nor you, nor me. So we need to have them at the table like grownups -
-- like adults, set the example to try to see if they can get their thing together, because we do need to get this right. So the test that I talked about at the end of the day, at the end of the speech is, what are we prepared to do? What are we prepared to do? So I will leave you with this, Mr. President: This is a test we cannot fail, because at risk is our children. Thank you. (Applause.)
you, Councilman. The Chair recognizes Councilwoman Brown.
Thank you, Mr. President. It is no secret that many of us here in Council have been vigilant, consistent and persistent when it comes to advocating opportunities and particularly job opportunities for residents of Philadelphia. Today I introduced a measure where the goal and outcome is hoped to increase the bidding preference for Philadelphia-owned firms from 5 percent to 15 percent. Cases where outside companies closely outbid those based in Philadelphia, this measure will help tilt the scale to the local firm, assuring that our Philadelphia taxpayers' dollars are helping support Philadelphia companies, creating jobs and always growing the local economy. I and many others have noticed a consistent pattern during our City contracts continue to be awarded to companies outside of our city. We need to ensure that when we spend the money of Philadelphia taxpayers on goods and services, our priority should be, and I submit must be, to create more new jobs for Philadelphians. We purchase millions of dollars worth of goods and services from companies outside of Philadelphia when we have local citizens who stand ready, equipped and willing to do the work. The ideal model for generating more revenue for the City is not raising taxes. It is creating more taxpayers through local job creation. It is my hope that this measure will keep more of Philadelphia's money in Philadelphia. I would remind my colleagues that this bill was co-sponsored by my champion on this issue and all issues related to contracting here in our city, Goode, Chair of City Council Committee on Commerce and Economic Development, a long-time advocate for fairness in local contracting. I thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Mr. President. It has been an interesting week listening to testimony that's been referred to and hearing about taxes and schools and other things. It's been a week of people willing to take necessary reputational risk to provide this body with confidence. We received a Solicitor's opinion this week that would not state that the formulaic tax or the smoothing approach within the formulaic tax that is proposed for AVI is legal. The statement no legal impediment. 2 billion was at stake. So we have a lack of reputational risk in the City Solicitor's Office. The District was asked a specific question, and, that is, will the approval of the plan that you're asking for and the addition of $94 million per year provide better outcomes for children. They would not answer the question, risk the reputation and say yes. They give us long answers about additional public input into their process and plan, et cetera, but they would not answer the question yes and risk their reputation. Yet, everybody comes to City Council and asks us, in the face of all these uncertainties, to risk our reputation, to not be professional and to act without the full information necessary to make informed, thoughtful is a complicated issue and it's not easily -- and I'm talking about AVI now -- that is not easily dealt with in sound bites, but the only way the public will know what the tax will mean to them individually and in the aggregate is with additional information. I don't have and City Council doesn't have the resources to take television ads or radio ads or ads in newspapers to make sure the public is fully informed. But there is a lot of things that the public don't know, and I am asking the press today to please report to the public what is happening here other than the issue of a 10 percent tax increase for schools and whether or not that's a hidden tax. This is a very complicated issue. There is a formula. I've seen no analysis of that formula, although it's been expounded upon in here greatly, in the press or anywhere else. The public has no idea what's coming. no idea what's coming. I'd like to give some specific examples and then a broad example. For example, houses are 30 to 40 percent -residential properties are 30 to 40 percent of fair market value today based on information, reports in the Inquirer from a couple years ago and information and testimony and private conversations. Commercial and industrial properties are at 70 to 80 percent of fair market value today. So what does that mean? That means that a typical residential home that has $300,000 of fair market value, but a hundred thousand dollar value in the current system has a $3,000 tax bill. That tax bill with a $15,000 homestead exemption will go to $3,420. A commercial property with a million dollar fair market value that is on the books today at $700,000 and being taxed at that rate pays $21,280. Under tax, it will pay $12,000. In other words, there will be a massive shift from the commercial and industrial sector on the order of several hundred million dollars based on calculations that start with assumptions that were given to us by Mr. Dubow that the public is not aware of. Not only is there a 9 percent tax increase, there is a shift from commercial and industrial taxpayers to residential taxpayers on the order of up to a couple hundred million dollars. So taxes today being paid by the commercial/industrial sector are $484 million compared to $616 million on the residential side. That will shift -- the shift will occur such that over $800 million will come from residences. This is something the public needs to know and we should all be discussing.
But, of course, the Administration has testified they can't confirm these numbers because they don't know what the aggregate value of property City of Philadelphia. We do know this: We know that the Administration told PICA it would be three to four times the current $38 billion, which is 114 billion aggregate value up to 152 billion aggregate value. We know that the census in the Controller's Office estimates that it's about $120 billion of aggregate value. We know that when you take Mr. 25 percent after smoothing that he thinks will be -- is proper to apply to all real estate in the City, that that is about $100 billion aggregate value. Knowing what the aggregate value is really is important in terms of determining what people are going to pay. Knowing the aggregate value of each of commercial and industrial and residential is important for us to know this distribution. If commercial and industrial businesses are going to get a windfall in the face of a tax increase, we need to do means we need to drastically increase the homestead exemption that's been proposed by the Administration, which we hope will pass the State Legislature, or we need to look at a tax that we can apply that is less than the windfall to only commercial and industrial property owners, and that's a significant increase in the use and occupancy tax, which applies to the School District, which would relieve residences of having to pay any share of this whatsoever. All of these are important questions, all of which should be addressed by us, by the Administration and should be talked about with the public, and I hope, I hope that we get there, we get additional information and the public begins to understand that they are paying the lion's share of this shift to AVI, and it is up to us to protect them with full information from the Administration. you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Councilman. The Chair recognizes Councilman O'Brien.
Thank you, Mr. President. I'd like to echo some of the sentiments made by the Majority Leader in observations that I had this week on the School District. I remember when John Street was Mayor, there was a proposal that was advanced, in cooperation with the City of Philadelphia and the state, where for every dollar that the City of Philadelphia put up, we got $2 in return. Sadly, that conversation by testimony from the School Reform Commission says for every dollar that we put up in the 94 million, the state is going to take two away. I find that unconscionable and unacceptable. I also am asking significant questions that relates to the special City of Philadelphia. We created a state-of-the-art autism conversation in 2008 by investing millions of dollars. We trained 200 teachers in 100 schools, and that's all disappearing and the contract is not being renewed. So that doesn't represent a significant interest in one population that I've been known to advocate for. The other issue that is of significance to me are kids that learn differently. And it's not Philadelphia's problem, but it is our responsibility. We have kids that go to school and they're not visual learners, they're auditory learners, they have ADHD, dyslexia and language processing issues. I see nothing in this conversation that will change their opportunities. The only opportunity, the only thing they have to look forward to is being involved in the criminal justice system in the future. That's unacceptable for me, and be unacceptable for members of the City Council. The $94 million, I have a different take. I just saw that the TransPasses and the contribution by the PFT on their optical and their dental plans, that money was a one-time fix. That disappears and now we're finding $94 million to replace that. That's not creative, progressive thinking. Pedro Ramos made a statement that he's going to go off script, and he went off script just for a couple seconds, but long enough to say that what we really need is a PICA kind of approach to the School District of Philadelphia for the future of our kids. I say make that the script. I call upon the Governor and the Mayor to create such a PICA mechanism so that we can focus on academics, we can focus on fiscal responsibility, and we can focus on public safety and advance all the needs. I'm looking for a vision. I'm to address those chronic issues that year after year after year that the State Legislature and City Council sidestep. We have to make a difference, and we have to do it now.
Thank you, Councilman. The Chair recognizes Councilman Goode.
Thank you, Mr. President. All 17 members of this body sat here this week and listened to the School Reform Commission. I think we heard different things, and I think different members will create their own context for what we heard. But in terms of what the public really needs to know, my questioning was very purposeful, and there's some real truths that came out and not just opinion. The first truth that came out was the District based its budget and five-year plan on the Mayor and did not request a $94 million tax increase. That's simply the truth. What the District is asking for is very simple. They want a property assessment of real estate based on actual value. Because that has not happened for several years, the School District has lost money for several years. So it's simply asking us what we decided to do through legislation that we all co-sponsored and passed, establishing an Office of Property Assessment, which was supposed to do a full value assessment. The School District is simply asking us to do what we said we were going to do. Then the District wants to return to a 60/40 split of property tax revenue. When we had our first crisis back when the School Reform Commission was formed, there was roughly a $216 million deficit. What we did then was take the split of property tax revenue, which was 55 going to the School District 45 going to the City, and we shifted it from 55 percent to 58 percent going to the School District. Five years ago when there was another problem, I sponsored legislation, co-sponsored by many people in this Council and unanimously approved, that moved it from 58 percent to 60 percent. Over the last few years because of actions that we have taken, that percentage of dollars going to the School District has decreased back to 55 percent. So what they simply want is 60 percent of what we bring in in terms of new property assessment. The District's five-year plan which they presented says that after they receive 60 percent of newly assessed property revenue, they will not be back to us any time soon. They would not be back to us. All they want us to do is reassess property fairly and then they want 60 percent of the cut. That's something we decided to do as a body five ago, something I believe that we would be willing to do again, making public education a priority, saying that 60 percent of that revenue should go to the District. Now, if the School Reform Commission comes back to us, if we do approve this, within that five-year period, what we should do then is simply ask them to vote to disband themselves and return to local control. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Councilman. The Chair recognizes Councilman Johnson.
Thank you, Mr. President. I just want to make an announcement that on this Saturday, we're having our fourth annual Mother's Day Ball in the 2nd Councilmanic District at St. Charles Senior Center. And so for all my constituents who are listening via Channel 64, I just want to give them an opportunity to sign up and come out and participate. And to all of -- everyone who is here, have a good Mother's Day weekend with your parents and God bless.
Thank you, Councilman. The Chair recognizes Councilman Green.
Thank you, Mr. President. I want to basically agree with Councilman Goode's thesis statement that he just stated. The School District, of course, did simply base their budgeting on what the Mayor and Governor put in their budgets. And I think something that has been missing in this respect is accountability for the appointing authority of the people who represent the Mayor and Governor on the SRC. The SRC did come and say that it's not their fault that we're in this members. That is absolutely a correct statement. But it is the fault of the Mayor and Governor that they need additional revenue from the City of Philadelphia. And so I don't know what else to say about that, but this has been a week of lack of accountability of those responsible for the District, with City Council once again on the firing line and a lack of reputational risk. I also do want to state that Mr. Knudsen said clearly in response to various questions that if they were not able to do $218 million of deficit financing or if they don't get $156 million in concessions from the City's unions over the course of the five-year plan, they would in fact be back to City Council. I think this is what we should also measure. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Mr. President. As far back as I remember, there has rarely been local control of the School District. Even when the Mayor was in charge under Mayor Green, under Mayor Goode, under Mayor Rendell, there were staggered terms of Board members. Those Board members were picked by different political regimes, and those regimes were there basically just to divvy up the contracting opportunities. It wasn't until Michael Nutter as a Councilperson introduced a Charter amendment that said there should be one person accountable and that person should be the Mayor, that there was actual local control. The voters approved that in 1999. John Street came in and was the first person who was totally in charge and empowered. We were in a grave fiscal condition at that point. There was no to be helped along without a partnership with the state. But at that point, there was a partnership. At that point, there was a $216 million deficit. The City put up $45 million; the state put up $75 million. It was a true partnership. Once again, I just state for the record I don't have a problem moving to a 60/40 split. I don't have a problem with reassessing properties. What I will have a problem with, if the SRC comes back to us after that. They can actually take a vote. The Mayor's two appointees and any one of the Governor's appointees can vote to disband themselves, and then we'll move back to local accountability and local control with the Mayor in charge of appointing all the School Board members. Thank you, Mr. President.
Thank you, Councilman. No other speeches? (No response.)
I would like to say before I call for Councilwoman Brown for an adjournment, we have a 1 o'clock Committee of the Whole meeting. It is my hope that it will take all of five minutes. I will do everything that I can to hold it to five minutes, and then we have other business later on this afternoon. So with that, I would like to recognize Councilwoman Brown.
Thank you, Mr. President. I move that Council stand adjourned until Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. (Duly seconded.)
Thank you. It's been moved and properly seconded. Those in favor? (Aye.)
The ayes have it. m. ) CERTIFICATE I HEREBY CERTIFY that the proceedings, evidence and objections are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me upon the foregoing matter on May 10, 2012, and that this is a true and correct transcript of same. MICHELE L.