Butkovitz: AVI assessments worse than current system

City Controller Alan Butkovitz on Wednesday released an analysis of the recent citywide property reassessment and found that the new numbers are less accurate than those in the current system.

Butkovitz, who has been a vocal critic of Mayor Nutter's Actual Value Initiative, AVI, from the get go, paid tax expert Robert Strauss $27,500 to examine the new assessments. Strauss, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said Wednesday that the accuracy of the assessments were well below industry standards and that the city used incomplete data and insufficient resources to complete the reassessment.

He called AVI "a story about well-intentioned policy change but not effective implementation."

"The author could not have known the complicated set of assumptions and decisions that went into the process," he said.

Butkovitz' findings, McDonald said, "have to be seen for what they are - a $27,000 dollar report that comes out a few weeks before a city controller runs for reelection."

Butkovitz' study used data from the first 557,000 property assessments. Another 22,000 have been assessed since, which McDonald said could have contributed to the difference in findings.

You can read the controller's study here.