At Tuesday’s Finance Committee hearing, City Council members took a tag-team approach to dragging the Revenue Department commissioner and Board of Revision of Taxes (BRT) chairman over the coals for recent property tax reassessments.

Commissioner Nancy Kammerdeiner responded to the tough questions and angry audience members with a deadpan explanation of which proposals the administration considers legal and which ones it considers illegal.

In his written statement, BRT Chairman David Glancey gave Council his version of Econ 101. "As we all know rising [property] values ultimately translate [in]to rising tax bills," he explained. "People are looking for predictability. The problem is that there is nothing very predictable about real estate values. The real estate market, like all markets, is subject to volatile swings in value from time to time."

Council members responded to Glancey with their own tutorial in political science. When constituents' taxes jump, even if it's because their property values have risen beyond their wildest dreams, they get hopping mad. And if their representatives in City Council don't try to lower those tax bills, they're going to lose votes.

But while the councilpeople shared a common enemy, in their questions towards Commissioner Nancy Kammerdeiner and Chairman David Glancey, there were notable jabs at one another. With a slew of proposals on the table, members tried to push their bills and drag down the rest.

For example, Councilman Frank DiCicco asked the witnesses about the potential for a situation in which the heirs to a property inherit a tax bill larger than the property's worth. DiCicco's hypothetical situation was meant to illustrate a weakness in a bill proposed by Councilman Frank Rizzo, which allows homeowners to defer payments on their real estate taxes until they sell their property.

Then Councilman Brian O'Neill chimed in, saying that his hardworking constituents in the Northeast are "lucky if their income is going up two or three percent" a year, making even the 10 percent cap proposed in a bill by Councilman Michael Nutter way too high.

Real estate tax legislation of some sort is sure to emerge from City Council in the coming weeks. The first issue to be sorted out is whether to endorse targeted tax relief for the poor and senior citizens, or across-the-board tax relief for anyone with rising property taxes.

"I don't think an individual who makes $5 million a year should get the same tax [cap] as someone making $35,000 a year," argues Coucilman Darrell Clarke, whose district includes some of the wealthiest (Rittenhouse Square) and poorest (Strawberry Mansion) neighborhoods in the city.

Councilman DiCicco disagrees. "I think we need to help our senior citizens," he says, but the city also has to change tax policies that "discourage people from staying in the city."

"We have to help everyone or we can't help anyone," argues Councilman O'Neill, both on principle and out of necessity. Targeted tax relief would require legislation in the statehouse, which O'Neill considers unlikely to pass.

Labor Pains

Councilman David Cohen attended his first Council session of the season on Sept. 26. The left-wing councilman suffered a wound to his left leg when a 5-year-old bicyclist ran into him on the boardwalk in Ocean City, N.J. Using the open speech time at the end of Council session, Cohen talked about what had been on his mind while in rehab.

The octogenarian councilman contrasted the medical workers who took care of him, most of whom worked for modest wages, with the building trades unions squabbling over work rules at the convention center.

As a longtime union lawyer, Cohen took advantage of the rule that you can tell your best friend when his breath stinks to tell off the building trades unions.

Cohen hearkened back to his early days in the labor movement, when "the organizing of unions was a crusade," in which the needs of society at large, not just those already organized, were taken into account. Today, he says, organized labor in Philadelphia has become a struggle "to prevent someone from opening a suitcase at the convention center."

To Pat Gillespie, who heads the Philadelphia Building Trades Council, this was a cheap shot. "No one should be giving anyone a hassle about opening a suitcase at the convention center. That's not what organized labor in Philadelphia is about. That's not what the building trades are about."

What they are about, says Gillespie, is getting jobs for their members--something Councilman Cohen opposes when it comes in the form of taxpayer-funded stadiums. According to Gillespie, Councilman Cohen is "always the first person there to say how many rights workers should have -- except the right to a job."

Cohen says the bad blood between him and Gillespie goes back to the days of the Philadelphia Plan, a Nixon administration initiative to integrate the city's building trades unions. Cohen supported the initiative, which was unpopular with the unions.