{"id":154162,"date":"2026-04-01T09:50:29","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T09:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/154162\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T09:50:29","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T09:50:29","slug":"mayor-parker-proposes-delivery-tax-to-pay-for-pothole-squads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/154162\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayor Parker proposes delivery tax to pay for ‘pothole squads’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Love Philly? So do we. Let\u2019s be friends.\u00a0Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As grumbling peaked last month over Philly\u2019s bumper crop of seasonal potholes<\/a>, Mayor Cherelle Parker proposed creating six new \u201cpothole squads\u201d to proactively patch damaged roads \u2014 along with a new tax to pay for them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomebody\u2019s going to say, \u2018Did you just get all excited about potholes?\u2019\u201d Parker exclaimed during her annual budget speech, to cheers and applause. \u201cAnd what I\u2019m going to say is that, until you\u2019ve had to go and get your shocks or your car serviced because you hit a pothole, you don\u2019t know how serious an issue this is in the city of Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n

To bump up the Street Department\u2019s road-maintenance budget by $15 million, including $7 million to hire 24 people and buy equipment and supplies, the mayor proposed a new 25-cent tax on retail deliveries.<\/p>\n

Food, medical supplies, baby products and wholesale goods would be exempt, as would retailers outside Philly that get few orders here. But the law would still require a multitude of companies \u2014 Amazon, Instacart, Walmart, GoPuff, Pets.com, the Rubber Chicken Shop<\/a> (if they get enough orders) and countless others \u2014 to pay the city a quarter every time a package containing any covered item is dropped off at a home or business.<\/p>\n

The proposal got buried under the furor over two other new business taxes she has proposed \u2014 a $1-per-trip tax on Uber and Lyft<\/a> to raise money for the school district, and a higher hotel tax to support homeless shelters that would require action by the state legislature.<\/p>\n

\"\"An Amazon driver blocked a SEPTA bus stop on Market Street while he delivered packages. Jan. 9, 2025. (Meir Rinde\/Billy Penn)<\/p>\n

But the retail delivery tax is attracting opposition as well, including from a national e-commerce industry group that\u00a0 has used an affordability argument to successfully lobby against similar \u201cdoorstep taxes\u201d across the country. Only two such levies currently exist, in Colorado and Montana.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is going to be a lot of opposition and a lot of meaningful conversation,\u201d said Brianna January of the Virginia-based Chamber of Progress, which is funded by Amazon, Google, and other big companies, and plans to lobby against Parker\u2019s proposal. \u201cFolks are having conversations both directly with legislators and with the mayor\u2019s office, but also in the public forum.\u201d<\/p>\n

A big year for potholes<\/p>\n

While potholes<\/a> are a perennial problem<\/a> in Philadelphia, this year\u2019s harsh weather has made them particularly evident, as residents have enthusiastically documented<\/a> on social media<\/a>. Recent highlights include a huge hole in Kensington<\/a> that reportedly \u201cswallowed\u201d a Water Department truck and a \u201ccrater-sized\u201d pothole<\/a> in Grays Ferry that damaged multiple cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a brutally cold winter and back-to-back winter weather events of snow and ice and rain and sleet,\u201d Streets Commissioner Kristin Del Rossi told Billy Penn. \u201cThat freeze-thaw process really does a number on the roadways, and that\u2019s why you see so many potholes at this point in time in the year.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2025, the city filled over 50,000 potholes, according to budget documents. Meanwhile, in just the first two and a half months of 2026, more than 21,000 have been repaired, Del Rossi said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Potholes and street damage generally are one of the top issues residents want addressed, according to feedback received at the city\u2019s Neighborhood Community Action Centers. In the administration\u2019s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, it responded with the proposal to create the new \u201cpothole posses\u201d or squads.<\/p>\n

The goal is to create a new crew in each of the Street Department\u2019s six highway districts that will spend part of its time scouring the roads for new holes and fixing them, rather than primarily responding to 311 calls about the defects, Del Rossi said. The squads would patch about 15,000 holes a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about the pothole squad as a way for us to try to be proactive instead of reactive,\u201d Parker said during her March 12 budget address in City Hall\u2019s council chambers. \u201cAnd if you like those residential street cleaning teams<\/a>, members of City Council, I think you\u2019re going to love the pothole squad. Give it up for the pothole squad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Learning from Colorado<\/p>\n

The Parker administration has generally moved in the direction of gradually reducing taxes<\/a> on Philadelphia companies, in an effort to boost business creation and employment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now, however, to help fund some of her priorities, the mayor is proposing new taxes on firms that aren\u2019t necessarily based in the city. That includes retailers that do deliveries, Uber and Lyft, and online businesses generally, which would be required to start charging their Philly customers the city\u2019s 2% sales tax.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The retail delivery tax \u201cwas chosen because it ties the use of the funds \u2014 improvements to roads \u2014 to activities that have an impact on road conditions (delivery vehicles),\u201d Finance Director Rob Dubow said in an email. \u201cWhile this approach is still relatively new, we\u2019re seeing more jurisdictions explore it as delivery activity increases.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDelivery traffic has grown significantly, and this ensures we can maintain infrastructure without raising broad-based taxes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The proposal was shaped in part by studying the statewide delivery fees in Colorado and Minnesota, Dubow said.<\/p>\n

In 2021, Colorado established a 27-cent fee pinned to inflation that has since risen to 28 cents<\/a>. It exempts businesses with less than $500,000 in sales the previous year. The fee initially generated about $76 million a year, in part for \u201cclean transportation\u201d projects, according to a summary by CSG Midwest<\/a>, a state policy think tank.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Minnesota\u2019s fee of 50 cents per delivery or transaction excludes business with less than $1 million in sales, and exempts deliveries of drugs, medical devices, food, and baby products, as Philadelphia\u2019s tax would. It was first levied in 2024 and was projected to collect $59 million a year, with revenue mostly distributed to municipalities.<\/p>\n

In both states, measures have been introduced<\/a> to eliminate the fees or create new exemptions, but none have passed.<\/p>\n

Fee proposals have been studied or debated by lawmakers in several other jurisdictions. A PennDOT advisory committee<\/a> said last year that Pennsylvania policymakers \u201cshould consider a package delivery fee to fund needed transportation infrastructure,\u201d but legislators have not taken up the suggestion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNew York City and state have failed several times\u201d to pass delivery fee legislation, as have Boston and the state of Massachusetts, said January, the Chamber of Progress\u2019s director of government relations for the Northeast. \u201cConnecticut has considered several times. Vermont, Rhode Island, Indiana, and Maine as well, I believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Virginia\u2019s legislature recently discussed but did not pass multiple proposals, and Maryland lawmakers considered proposals for three years in a row before dropping the idea, she said. Legislators in Hawaii and Mississippi have also proposed instituting delivery fees.<\/p>\n

Industry teams up with disabled advocates<\/p>\n

January said her organization has sent information packets opposing Philadelphia\u2019s proposed tax to the Parker administration, councilmembers and state legislators, and plans to lobby against it as budget discussions continue over the next two months.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The packet cites a January 2025 poll the Chamber of Progress commissioned that found 80% opposition to delivery fees among Pennsylvania residents. The figure rose slightly when those surveyed were informed \u201cabout criticism of the fee.\u201d Subsequent polls in December found 53% opposition among Colorado residents and 48% opposition in Minnesota.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An analysis the Chamber of Progress commissioned argues that the fees disproportionately harm small businesses, impact jobs and wages, create burdens on consumers who end up being charged more for their purchases, and constitute a \u201cregressive tax\u201d on disadvantaged households.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur concern is really the impact to marginalized communities that rely on delivery for essentials. Folks that are disabled, the elderly, folks that are on fixed income, that have no other choice but to use delivery services because they can\u2019t get to the stores frequently,\u201d January said. \u201cThis is a direct impact to their bottom line.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Maryland and other places, her organization has teamed up with advocates for people with disabilities to argue against creating the new taxes, she said.<\/p>\n

Dubow argued that concerns about reduced employment or harm to consumers were overblown.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt a quarter a delivery, we don\u2019t believe it will have a meaningful impact on the number of deliveries,\u201d he said. \u201cWe also were intentional about exempting items like food, medical supplies, and baby products to reduce the burden of the tax.\u201d<\/p>\n

Questions about tax administration<\/p>\n

Sentiment in Philadelphia toward Parker\u2019s proposal is unclear, in part perhaps because the idea is new and has been overshadowed by the debate over the rideshare tax.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Disability Rights PA and AARP\u2019s Pennsylvania office said they were unfamiliar with the proposal. A spokesperson for the Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia said the organization is still reviewing the tax and declined to comment. The Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce and Industry did not respond to a query.<\/p>\n

Lauren Alden, a director at the Philadelphia advocacy group Liberty Resources, was concerned about the tax\u2019s potential impact on the city\u2019s nearly quarter-million residents with disabilities, \u201cmany of whom rely on delivery services because transportation barriers, inaccessible stores, or health conditions make in-person shopping difficult,\u201d she said. \u201cFor these residents, delivery is often a necessity rather than a convenience.\u201d<\/p>\n

The group encourages the city to add safeguards so the fee doesn\u2019t make it harder for people to live independently, such as exemptions for people with disabilities, she said.<\/p>\n

City Council has so far only briefly discussed the measure. During a hearing Wednesday, Councilmember Jim Harrity said the city should do more to make contractors fix their own road cuts and trenches rather than leaving it to the city to fund repairs, and said he was worried about businesses wrongly charging customers even for exempt deliveries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere needs to be some checks and balances there, because if they could find a way to get over by throwing that fee on there, even though it\u2019s exempt, some of these bad actors will throw the fee,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Councilmember Jamie Gauthier asked about Instacart deliveries that include both taxable and exempt items, such as groceries, and asked why the city couldn\u2019t exempt such mixed deliveries from the tax.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d probably see a lot of orders that just add a non-taxable [item] so that people didn\u2019t have to pay,\u201d Dubow said. \u201c\u2018Let\u2019s find a non-taxable thing to throw in.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Love Philly? So do we. Let\u2019s be friends.\u00a0Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today. As grumbling peaked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1896,9537,15321,69981,564,2265,17126,3431,69,71,70,61068,12252,36116,5800],"class_list":["post-154162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-amazon","tag-cherelle-parker","tag-disability","tag-disability-pride-pa","tag-featured","tag-finance","tag-google","tag-penndot","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news","tag-potholes","tag-streets","tag-streets-department","tag-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}