PILOT -- in the nonprofit and municipal world, PILOT means "payment in lieu of taxes". Most often, we see a PILOT offered by universities and hospitals.
A.J. Thompson of the Philadelphia Inquirer offers some PILOT-related suggestions after musing that:
(PILOT) payments are incredibly low when measured against their holdings, especially revenue-generating facilities on their expansive campuses. The city now gets next to nothing in these payments despite the large portion of city real estate owned by these universities and other large nonprofits.
He also notes:
We know that some of the larger nonprofits have large operating budgets and even have some enterprises that make a profit each year. Their executives earn for-profit-type salaries (because they do a good job and have made those institutions into economic engines for our city).
The universities, medical centers and other organizations contribute much to the vibrancy of our city and have helped develop areas that needed it. But they've done this while remaining largely exempt from paying for city services like any other business. Admittedly, since the city real-estate tax and assessment system is in a state that even Franz Kafka couldn't put into words, our city couldn't even dream of calculating a fair payment from these organizations - but I think we should challenge these entities, much like Pittsburgh did.
So, Mr. Thompson offers other equally interesting recommendations:
Let's get a few business and nonprofit leaders together to examine the needs of the city's threatened libraries, swimming pools and cultural institutions.
They can examine what some other cities are doing, calculate the needs we have and come up with a fair number for the next five years. Sunsetting the payments should dull the protests.
The money can be dedicated to funding just those "luxuries" we're told we can't have anymore, the ones that, to most of us, make Philadelphia home. Instead of calling them PILOTs, we can jazz up the acronym to FUN, for "funding underbudgeted necessities."
What do you think -- how likely the possibility in your city?