Budget Discussion

Photo by Jesse Brown

March 15, 2009

Sucessful City Budget Forum

NN Sponsored Event Draws 200 Participants

The most important issue in Philly politics right now is the budget and how funding and taxation look after it is drafted. In anticipation NN and others met on March 14 to learn about and discuss choices about these matters. It was a highly informative and productive meeting....

Getting Informed

Sharon Ward, Director of the nonprofit PA Budget and Policy Center in Harrisburg, spoke about the Philadelphia budgets, how tax revenue is collected now and from whom. We learned a lot of stuff about how the budget is made up - all of which was on Powerpoint slides and in a handout. Every year there is a new 5-year plan. There were a few non-essentials which Nutter himself has already talked about cutting - a big cut in the city fleet of cars, for example. The deficit projections she showed based on current revenue and spending patterns gets scary big over the next decade, so something has to give - revenue up, spending down.

Fascinating fact: the money spent to attract business by reducing the business privilege tax is largely wasted: for every $1 spent on tax reduction, we get only 60 cents back in retaining tax revenue. We'd be in good shape if we even got a little property tax revenue from the two largest institutions in the city - Penn and Temple - who as nonprofits pay no property tax at all.

So something has to change. We are on the right track to look at changes in all sorts of things - property tax, income tax, etc.

Action Planning

After the presentations, NN neighborhood groups met to plan their regional actions. There were plans for lobbying actions for City Council, petitions and other means to retain essential services. A number of such activities were planned for the following weekend.

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