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Nutter Holds Closed Door Meeting On Property Tax Values In Philadelphia

By Mike Dunn

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Mayor Nutter held a closed-door briefing for City Council members Tuesday on next year's planned overhaul of Philadelphia property taxes. Sources tell KYW Newsradio that at the meeting, the total value of all city properties was put at just under $100-billion.

Mayor Nutter and aides met privately with council members with partial results of the citywide reassessment of all 580,000 properties in the city. He spoke to reporters after the hour-long session:

"Significant progress has been made, and we expect in the next day or so to be able to release some citywide data. We'll have a significantly accurate number of the total value of properties throughout the city of Philadelphia."

Sources at the meeting tell KYW Newsradio that the mayor's office is putting to the total value of all properties now at roughly $98 Billion dollars. That's nearly twice the aggregate value used in the current system, a system that all city officials admit is widely inaccurate.

And the figure is somewhat higher than the $85 Billion dollar figure that consultants hired by City Council had estimated earlier this year. That figure -- and how it breaks down among neighborhoods and property types -- will prove crucial as City Council and the mayor set a new tax rate in the coming year for bills that would be due in 2014.

"We are very, very close to fully fixing the property assessment system in Philadelphia, and that is a good thing."

Nutter had originally wanted the new assessment system, dubbed the Actual Value Initiative, to be used for tax bills due in 2013. But because the assessments were not then complete, Council opted to delay implementation by one year.

Under the new system, some homeowners will come out ahead, while others are expected to pay higher property taxes. Over the coming weeks and months the mayor's office will unveil further breakdowns of the new assessments, and residents will know their own individual assessment by February.

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