Tuesday, January 26, 2010

SF Supervisors Table Vote on Church's $21 Million+ Tax Assessment

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors were scheduled to vote on the Transfer Tax Reassessment against the Archdiocese at 3:00 PM today, but the votes were tabled.

The Archdiocese is challenging the reassessment, which amounts to over $21 million, including penalties and taxes, on the grounds that it was just a shift of properties within the Archdiocesan umbrella--as I understand it, no new owners, nothing was sold.

But the city, which has a history of hostility toward the church, maintains otherwise. This case is being watched by nonprofits nationwide.

From todays meeting transcribed while I listened:

President David Chiu: "Supervisor Dufty, these are your items."

Supervisor Dufty then moved to table the items: " ..table these items while we await the report of the Transfer Tax Review Board. Wait for completion of the secondary report"

President Chiu then tabled the two items, numbers 39 & 40 on today's agenda.

So these are now "Supervisor Dufty's items." That makes sense. Our last post on this subject included transcripts and video of Supervisor's meetings that showed Dufty was amending the relevant law with the Church in mind.

We've point out before that Supervisor Dufty is a homoactivist politician, and one of the signatories of Resolution 168-06, which called the Church "hateful," etc. That resolution resulted in a lawsuit against the city by San Francisco Catholics, which is currently being heard in Federal Court. We point out again that he was the consultant to Catholic Charities in the disastrous adoptions "compromise" which resulted in Catholic Charities supplying funding/staffing to Family Builders by Adoption who were required by contract to "increasing the number of GLBT adoptions."

Hardly the man to take ownership of this issue if you think the Church deserves a fair hearing.

UPDATE: They may vote on this later today.

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