Over 100 Penn students and Philadelphia community members gathered outside the Penn Police Department headquarters on 4040 Chestnut Street shortly after 12 p.m. on Friday to protest Penn Police's alleged involvement in tear gassing protesters on 52nd Street on May 31. … Protesters stood wearing masks and holding signs emblazoned with the groups' three demands: fire Penn Vice President for Public Safety and president of the Philadelphia Police Foundation Maureen Rush, defund the Penn Police Department, and pay PILOTs, payments that support the local Philadelphia community and school districts.

Professor Gerald Campano (GSE) spoke with the Bullhorn about PILOTs.

“The Philadelphia School District is facing an incredible level of crisis, and the way to address it is by increasing the revenue,” Farnsworth-Alvear said. “Schools have not had what they needed for decades in Philadelphia. To ask them now to invest the resources that are needed to address COVID-19 is not possible without property owners across the city thinking seriously about how to increase the revenue for public schools.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, a growing group of faculty and staff are for the first time issuing a collective call for for the Ivy League institution to eschew its privilege as a tax-exempt nonprofit and start paying at least part of what it would otherwise owe in property taxes annually to Philadelphia’s chronically underfunded public school system.

The University of Pennsylvania has a roughly $15 billion endowment, but pays no taxes on its noncommercial properties. Now, hundreds of staffers and faculty members say Penn should pay to support the underfunded public schools in the city.

More than 730 faculty and staff have signed a petition calling on Penn to pay Payments In Lieu of Taxes to the city. 

The campaign, Penn for PILOTs, is the first united effort by Penn faculty and staff that demands the University pay PILOTs, voluntary financial payments that property tax-exempt organizations make to local governments. 

Penn has a widely known history of failing to pay Payments in Lieu of Taxes, financial contributions that property tax-exempt organizations voluntarily make to local governments.

More than 500 faculty and staff members at the University of Pennsylvania have signed a petition calling on the school to make payments in lieu of taxes supporting the Philadelphia public schools — a campaign that has escalated in light of national protests demanding attention to racism and inequality.

[S]ome of the same activists who have urged the city to eliminate or reform its 10-year tax abatement for new construction or rehabilitation have called for PILOTs for institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, which owns at least $3.2 billion in property and has a $14.7 billion endowment.