By Patrick Cobbs

There’s a big fight brewing over taxes in City Hall. Today, City Council moved ahead with its plan to explore whether the city can legally raise the wage tax. Council adopted a resolution that requires City Finance Director Rob Dubow to officially determine if the city’s revenues are down by two-percent or more. If that has occurred, Under the State Gaming Act the city has the legal authority to raise its wage tax.

Only Councilmen Frank DiCicco and an emphatic James Kenney opposed the resolution.

“Because the wage tax has been the most onerous, job crushing, resident fleeing tax in the city’s history,” Kenney explained. “We have spent the last 15 years trying to get it down to the point that we are not a national joke anymore, when it comes to resident wage tax, and to go back in that direction I think is just totally backwards.”

Council President Anna Verna sponsored the resolution primarily to widen the discussion on taxes for next year’s budget and because she thinks the tax has some merits over Nutter’s call for higher property and sales taxes.

“We’ve been deluged by seniors calling about the proposed increase in real estate taxes,” she said. “The mayor has said ‘everything’s on the table,’ and then we should put everything on the table.”

Councilman Bill Green clearly agreed with her. “This is an action that needs to be taken by the administration, and frankly it’s irresponsible for them not to have done so already,” he said.

That idea of “irresponsibility” didn’t seem to hold water with Rob Dubow.

“I don’t think taking this action of determination means it’s the first time people have thought about wage tax,” Dubow said in a phone interview Thursday. “What we have been told repeatedly is that our doing this would get state legislators mad at us and they would be less likely to do any of the things we wanted them to do.”

Dubow may be right, if you consider the warning State Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) of Delaware County has given the city.

“Any assistance that the city will be seeking form the state will be complicated significantly if City Council continues down this path,” he said through his spokesman Erik Arneson.

That assistance might include granting approval for a three year temporary sales tax increase of one percent, and the extension of city pension amortization schedules from 20 to 40 years. Both of which the city administration has deemed vital to its budget plan.

Such an emphasis on Harrisburg’s reaction brings up yet another of Green’s criticisms. Namely that Nutter did not consider the ‘in house’ effects of his favored taxes on seniors and households with low incomes. Green is convinced a wage tax increase will be significantly less burdensome on these groups than the real estate and sales would have.

For Councilman Green, the impact on residents, needs to be examined more and today’s resolution was his way ensuring that.

“That’s why we want to have the debate about the issue on the merits,” he said. “Not, you know, ‘I’m not even going to talk about any tax increases but property taxes.’ I don’t think that’s constructive. And if we have the debate alone [IE: without Harrisburg], and we have an engaged dialog, I think we’ll win. So I think the administration needs to start talking to us about it.”

Somehow I picture Green as a good handball player - good at controlling the court.

And while we’re on fanciful notions, I brought this one to Arneson: would City Council’s push for a wage tax increase actually increase the appeal of Nutter’s requests in Harrisburg?

He laughed. He emphasized that what Nutter was asking for was difficult but that wage tax increases were in a whole different league. Then he admitted that Nutter’s public opposition to wage tax increases does play well in the State Capital.