“It is a morass of bureaucratic inefficiency. And it’s killing business in our City.”

by pkerkstra on August 12, 2011

Forbes has a terrific piece today from a Philadelphia accountant on the saga of a poet – yes a poet – was was told by the City of Philadelphia that he owes $10,000+ in taxes for a single reading he gave at St. Joseph’s University in 2007. What immense fortune did the poet earn for that reading to warrant such a steep bill? $2,000.

The maze that is Philadelphia’s insane tax system is nearly impossible to navigate. I went on Revenue’s web site and counted four separate types of tax that may apply to individuals and fourteen separate types of tax that may apply to businesses. Keep in mind that these taxes are in addition to state and federal taxes.

E-filing? Forget about it – unless you happen to use Internet Explorer 5.0. You get the feeling that the entire system is, in fact, being run from a Commodore 64 in the basement of City Hall.

Philadelphia’s entire revenue system is indeed a wreck. Stay tuned, as there’s more to come on this in the Inquirer and PlanPhilly very soon.

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Flash mobs, Nutter and race shaming

by pkerkstra on August 11, 2011

Michael Nutter’s flash mob-inspired Cosby moment at the pulpit on Sunday was a fascinating political move for a mayor who—more than any before him—stands astride the wide chasm between white and black in Philadelphia.

Nutter spoke for about 30 minutes. He apologized, on behalf of the city, to Philadelphia’s law-abiding residents. He lectured irresponsible parents. He warned flash mobbers that they’d be locked up. But the money phrase—the one that warranted pull-quote treatment on the cover of the Daily News—was this: “Quite honestly, you’ve damaged your own race.”

Whatever you think of the remark—whether you consider it scapegoating or right on target—it was perhaps Nutter’s bravest political moment as Mayor. For one, Nutter’s standing among black voters is tenuous at best. He’s seen by many black voters, rightly or wrongly, as not one of them. For a mayor with that problem, to walk into Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, and castigate African-American parents—fathers in particular—for not taking responsibility for their children takes some serious guts.

Inquirer columnist Annette John-Hall took the cynical view that the whole thing was a pander to white voters. “At that point, he wasn’t talking to black people anymore,” she wrote.

I don’t buy it. Maybe what Nutter did was counterproductive. Maybe he should have shown more empathy. Maybe he should have stayed out of the pulpit altogether and stuck to the nuts and bolts business of police patrols and curfews.

But Nutter meant what he said, and he didn’t say it to shore up white support. I mean let’s face it, he already has plenty of that.

No, Nutter actually believes this stuff. If you look at his career, and his public remarks over the years, it’s crystal clear he feels that Philadelphia’s black community is responsible for a lot of its own ills. It might not be ideal that he chose to air these thoughts so publicly in the aftermath of a series of attacks on white people in Center City, but it’s far from the first time Nutter has preached the gospel of black self-reliance.

“When we were younger, we didn’t need a law, we didn’t need a bill, we didn’t need a resolution, we didn’t need a government to tell us: ‘Come outside and sweep your steps, wash down your sidewalk, and make your neighborhoods clean,’” Nutter said in 2007, after winning the Democratic nomination for mayor.

“We didn’t need anybody to tell us that because we cared. About where we lived, and who we were and what we were about. We need to bring that back, a sense of community pride, a sense of ownership, a sense of caring about each other. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.”

And as Monica Yant Kinney points out today, after a Greek Picnic in 1998 led to violence, Nutter said  ”It’s not about what the white man did,” he said of those incidents. “It’s not about slavery or oppression. It’s about nothing. It’s about being ignorant and disrespectful.”

As he is fond of reminding people, Nutter grew up in a working-class black neighborhood in West Philadelphia. His parents had their share of problems (his father may have drank too much), but they nonetheless expected a lot from their children. Nutter obviously met those expectations, winning a scholarship to St. Joe’s Prep before going on to Penn. At times, Nutter seems to be thinking: If I could do it, why the hell can’t more of you?

Not being black, I don’t feel remotely qualified to say whether the Mayor’s occasional forays into this kind of territory help matters or not. It’s certainly easy to imagine such rhetoric backfiring, further alienating already pissed-off black teens.

But don’t for a second assume this is an act. Nutter means every word of it, and he always has.

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The high costs of throwing everyone and their brother into jail

by pkerkstra on August 8, 2011

Seriously, it’s just too expensive. My latest column for the Inquirer is here. Excerpt:

You know money is tight when politicians – Republicans, no less – start talking about how expensive it is to lock people up.

In more normal times, few things get elected officials more excited than rigging the justice system with mandatory minimum sentences and other legislative maneuvers designed to stiffen the spines of squishy judges. The idea, of course, is to ensure that offenders, violent or otherwise, do the hardest time possible.

Voters are a skittish bunch. In large cities and small towns alike, they tend to think crime is getting worse though criminal violence has declined steadily since the early 1990s.

So politically, it has made sense to “get tough,” indefinitely. Fiscally though, the lock-everybody-up mania has been a disaster.

As reported by The Inquirer’s Joelle Farrell, Pennsylvania’s corrections budget now stands at $1.86 billion. That’s nearly half of Philadelphia’s entire annual operating budget. And it’s no wonder. The commonwealth’s prisons are now home to 51,000 inmates, up 41 percent since 1999.

The good news is that, if the political will is there, it’s not all that hard to get a handle on prison costs. It doesn’t require a huge drop in crime. It doesn’t require a willingness to let violent felons off easy. What it requires is a modicum of judgment, a realization that it’s not necessarily in the public’s best interest to go for the maximum punishment in every single instance.

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The virtues of selling out

by pkerkstra on August 8, 2011

Chris Wink thinks there’s an upside when big outside companies buy out Philly ones. I take the point. But frankly I’d rather it was Philly giants buying Philly startups.

Selling Out: why some acquisitions are good and others are bad for Philadelphia business « Christopher Wink.

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Atlantic City’s Last, Last, Last, Last, Last, Last, Last Chance

by pkerkstra on August 8, 2011

I  hadn’t spent much time at all in Atlantic City until very recently, when Philadelphia magazine sent me there to figure out how/if the city can survive as gambling revenue collapses. While there, I witnessed the aftermath of a shooting, saw a bag lady urinating beneath a hotel balcony and tiptoed around some hard-luck dudes a couple of cops had pinned to the sidewalk.

Also: I loved the place, and hope to go back soon. Yeah. Strange. I try to explain it better in the story. Here’s an excerpt:

LONG BEFORE THIS TRIP, and without ever really thinking all that hard about it, I had somehow decided that Atlantic City just wasn’t the place for me. I enjoy gambling only when I win, so I couldn’t see too much reason to go. That ambivalent take was all wrong. As I soon figured out, Atlantic City is packed with good reasons both to stay the weekend and to stay the hell away altogether.

A few years ago, Atlantic City would have been more or less indifferent to a non-gaming- tourist like myself. Not anymore. Gaming- revenue, the city’s lifeblood, has been in free fall three years running. Casinos with famous names—Resorts and the Trump Marina—have been sold off for less than some Shore vacation homes. The Hilton-, the spot where Frank Sinatra used to perform, stopped paying its mortgage in 2009.

Citywide, casino profits plummeted nearly 61 percent between 2006 and 2010. Adjusted for inflation, those profits are now at their lowest level since the early ’80s. Not even the mighty Borgata is immune: Last month, for a fifth straight quarter, it reported falling revenue compared to the same period one year earlier. Gaming executives say Atlantic City is now getting by on about $2 billion less in annual gaming revenue than it was in 2006.

To prevent gaming’s collapse from taking the whole town with it, Atlantic City is banking on a pair of big changes: a state takeover of half the city, and a fundamental market readjustment on the part of the casinos, which now recognize that their gambling-dominated models won’t work in a world where there are craps tables in Chester and baccarat in Bensalem. Revel, the striking new resort on the north end of the Boardwalk, slated to open next May, most completely represents the new thinking: gaming as just a piece of a total resort experience, one that actually embraces Atlantic City’s greatest assets—the Boardwalk, the ocean and the wide beach. The new state “tourism district” may be just as important. It exists primarily to eliminate, or at least better hide, Atlantic City’s enduring seediness, which Governor Chris Christie is convinced is the real reason for the city’s problems.

If these changes work, Atlantic City might finally become what its boosters have always billed it as: a playground for the masses-, equally enticing for families, bachelorette parties, and sophisticated couples on a weekend escape. If they don’t, well, the doomsday scenario is easy to imagine. Casinos begin to abandon Absecon Island. Unemployment rises, crime spikes, and the city becomes Camden on the ocean, with a Boardwalk instead of an aquarium. The great irony, of course, is that gambling was billed as the only alternative to just such a fate when it was legalized back in 1976.

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The stench of corruption not quite as overwhelming

by pkerkstra on August 2, 2011

Reading the drumbeat of corruption news out of City Hall, it’s easy to assume that the Philadelphia government is as ethically challenged as ever. Federal prosecutors have charged a Philadelphia lawyer with fraud for spending cash from a city business development loan on office expenses like Eagles and 76ers tickets, a senior city technology official was fired after being wined and dined by companies hoping to do business with the city, a contractor allegedly siphoned off more than $1 million in public funds by using bogus billings, and a grand jury began poking into the operations of the Sheriff’s Office. And that’s just in 2011.

Before that there was the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the Board of Revision of Taxes, the Clerk of Quarter Sessions… You get the point.

Wasn’t Mayor Nutter supposed to drain the swamp? Wasn’t he supposed to make us believe that city government is at least clean, if not always super effective?

That’s actually exactly what’s going on here. Unlike the probes of the past, in a lot of these cases it is Nutter’s own investigators who are digging up the dirt. In case after case, they’re going after corrupt actors on their own or dishing to the feds. [click to continue…]

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Zoning matters, so try to stay awake

by pkerkstra on July 27, 2011

When newspaper editors want to haze their young reporters—or drive older ones into early retirement—they send them to zoning board meetings. There, amid the ceaseless debate over easements and stormwater runoff, souls die. It is excruciatingly boring stuff.

And yet—yes, there’s a yet—the tedious matters managed by the zoning code and zoning boards (which generally exist to rule on cases where property owners want exceptions to the zoning code) have a huge impact on the look and feel of all communities. Can a developer put a skyscraper where the old laundromat used to be? How about a private pool or tattoo parlor?

The point is, zoning matters. A city without zoning looks, well, like Houston, which is the biggest U.S. city without a formal zoning code. Houston, if you have not been, is hell on earth.

Naturally Philadelphia’s zoning code is outdated, messy and a major hindrance to development. It dates back to the Eisenhower-era, and is so ill-suited for today’s world that a huge percentage of all significant projects are out of step with the zoning code.

Which means that, to get their projects built, developers have to go hat in hand to the Zoning Board of Adjustment. And that’s where everything runs off the rails.

Winning ZBA approval is all about politics. You won’t get anywhere at the zoning board without first having won over the district council member who represents the neighborhood where the project is sited. And winning a district council member’s approval is about two things: making kissy faces at the council person, and, convincing the local neighborhood associations and community groups that the project is in their best interest.

Note that I said in their best interest, not the community’s best interest. [click to continue…]

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Philly is rising, from the depths of hell

by pkerkstra on July 19, 2011

Have you heard? Philly is rising. It’s not clear from what or where, exactly. From the ashes, maybe. Perhaps the depth of hell. Or it could just be from the ranks of second (third?) tier cities. How do I know Philly is rising? Because Mayor Nutter says so. Constantly. The PhillyRising hashtag has become the mayor’s online equivalent of a thumbs up. And it’s not just him. His whole administration has embraced the slogan.

The phrase was coined by deputy managing director John Farrell, who needed a name for a new city community development program (which actually is a really good program).

As a program name, it’s just fine. The initiative targets blighted neighborhoods, rough, often crime-ridden communities that need all the rising they can get. But is this really how we want to think about Philadelphia as a whole? A town on the rebound? Points for honesty, I guess. But good god, where’s the pride?

I’m reminded of the Philadelphia Housing Authority’s “building beyond expectations.” Or SEPTA’s classic: “We’re getting there.” I have some suggestions in the same vein. How about: “Better than Baltimore.” Or: “Philly: Our homicide rate is no longer in the top 10!”

Actually, the City of Philadelphia already has an official slogan (not that anyone uses it): “Life, Liberty and You.” It’s self-evidently bland and inane, the mushy product of a 65-member committee (no, seriously, the committee had 65 members).

Nutter was test-driving a totally different slogan earlier this year: “Philly. It’s just better.” I kind of liked that one. It didn’t smack of the permanent civic inferiority complex that PhillyRising conjures up in my mind.

But Nutter and company aren’t really looking to brand the city here. What they’re actually trying to do is brand the administration. “PhillyRising” is their shorthand for Nutter’s accomplishments, which they feel have been given short shrift by the media and really the public at large. So Nutter and company have taken to slapping the #PhillyRising hashtag to any bit of good news they want to promote. In that context, it works pretty well. Short. Snappy. And pretty much meaningless, like most slogans.

So rise away, team Nutter. But just remember that nothing, nothing, beats the City of Brotherly Love.

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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On booze and communities

by pkerkstra on July 19, 2011

Alcohol is a really curious commodity, one with an outsized ability to shape communities, for good and ill. My Inquirer column today looks at how alcohol both fuels and slows community redevelopment, in the context of the potential legalization of Pennsylvania’s state store system. Full story here. An excerpt:

We don’t usually think of it this way, but booze can be a force for tremendous community good and a real redevelopment engine. Consider Northern Liberties. Long before the Piazza opened up and the fine restaurants moved in, Northern Liberties was known for its bar scene. Establishments like the Standard Tap and the 700 Club (now more than a decade old) were among the first major commercial investments in the neighborhood, helping to draw developer Bart Blatstein’s interest. … But as obviously good as more and better booze options might be for Center City, the case is less clear in other urban neighborhoods. For one thing, if the experience of other states is any guide, we can expect an overabundance of liquor stores to move into low-income neighborhoods.

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R.I.P. Tax Cutter, Mike Nutter

by pkerkstra on July 15, 2011

See if you can identify this unnamed elected official:

“We cannot grow, or even preserve, our revenue base unless we cut taxes.”
Tax reductions, “are all about jobs. The fiscally responsible thing we can do is lower the tax burden so businesses can grow.”
“In whatever capacity I’m speaking out, I’ll continue to push for tax cuts.”

Who is that tax-cutting champion? Is it Sen. Pat Toomey? Gov. Corbett or Gov. Christie? No. Those words—and many more like them—were all spoken by Michael Nutter before he was mayor.

The same guy, in other words, who is proposing this week to raise taxes a third straight year. Since taking office, Nutter has presided over a sales tax increase, a 10 percent property tax hike and a freeze on scheduled city-funded wage tax cuts passed in the Street administration (cuts that Councilman Nutter championed). There’s a new garbage fee for small businesses and apartment buildings and higher taxes for tobacco sellers and parking lot operators.

And that’s just what Nutter’s actually gotten passed. He tried but failed for a single-family home trash fee in 2009. And he’s working Council hard this week to get a tax on sugary drinks passed to come up with some cash for the school district. If that fails, property taxes could be going up. Again.

So what the hell happened to Mike Nutter, tax cutter? [click to continue…]

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PhillyStat zombie returns

by pkerkstra on July 12, 2011

Back when Michael Nutter first took office, the initiative called PhillyStat was as good a symbol as any that Change Had Come. Drawing its inspiration from corporate performance management practices and New York’s vaunted “CrimeStat” program (which some have credited with that city’s ever-falling crime rate), PhillyStat was supposed to make city managers better at their jobs by actually tracking the work their departments did. It would be televised (points for transparency), driven by hard facts and figures (points for accountability) and customer oriented (points for not treating residents like scum).

It was, for Philadelphia city government, a revolutionary concept. And it would all be led by Managing Director Camille Barnett, a star of the city government seminar circuit who Nutter hired to drag City Hall into the modern age.

But PhillyStat bombed. Hard. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, PhillyStat sessions quickly became City Hall’s version of Dilbert and Office Space rolled into one. The meetings were long, dull, and in the eyes of many senior managers, a complete waste of time. Barnett proved to be pretty good at beating up on officials who weren’t performing, but not so good at figuring out how to actually improve the departments’ work.

And so when Barnett mercifully left city government last year, her replacement—Managing Director Richard Negrin—immediately “suspended” PhillyStat. I figured it was gone for good.

But now PhillyStat is back. Kind of. Negrin is starting small with PhillyStat 2.0, working principally with the departments he directly controls, most of which are internal service departments like technology, personnel and records. That means those who hated the old PhillyStat the most—like Deputy Mayor for Transportation Rina Cutler—only have to participate once a quarter. That’s probably a good call. PhillyStat has such a toxic reputation among some city managers that forcing them to take part more often would only backfire.

Negrin hopes that his approach to PhillyStat will eventually win over converts. There are a few key differences between Barnett’s model and Negrin’s. To begin with, Negrin said, it’s not enough to measure performance.

“That only gets you so far. We need a more robust, true management performance system that actually helps our departments manage internally. This new model is incredibly different,” Negrin said.

He’s created senior management teams for each department. That’s not so new. The twist is that the teams include managers from other departments like finance, human resources, law and technology. It might seem like a dead obvious call, but Negrin said it hasn’t been done in city government before.

“It’s how I did things in the private sector. You would never hold a strategic meeting in the private sector without your chief technology officer, without your finance guy, without your lawyer. You just wouldn’t do that,” Negrin said.

He’s also naming a “customer service officer” for each of his leadership teams. Their job—one they’ll get special training for—is to act as the customers’ representative at each PhillyStat session.

Lastly, Negrin says PhillyStat sessions—and the department activities they’re monitoring—will be better linked to Nutter’s strategic vision for the city, which break down into five goals (which are themselves a topic for another day).

Given PhillyStat’s past performance, it’s hard to be optimistic about any of this. But Negrin is a good choice to run this kind of operation. He’s one of the few senior Nutter administration officials with management experience in the private sector (at Aramark), and he did impressive work in a short stint at the Board of Revision of Taxes when Nutter sent him in to restore order to an agency that was spinning out of control. What’s more, the model HAS worked in other cities. There’s really no good reason why it can’t work in Philadelphia as well. Eventually.

 (This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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Some welcome mat

by pkerkstra on June 29, 2011

I was right there in spirit with City Council when it voted in its final pre-summer session to give the finger to the federal office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The department’s “Secure Communities” program—which gets local police departments to hand over arrest records to the feds who use the information to identify deportation targets—might make sense in Texas, Arizona or some other place where illegal immigration has become a major problem. But it’s a bad fit for Philadelphia, a city that sorely needs the growth, vitality and sheer population boost that immigration provides (even, yes, when it’s illegal).

Secure Communities was billed as a way for the feds to more easily identify and deport serious criminals. “They told us they were going to get Mexican drug cartels and terrorists off the street,” says Councilman Jim Kenney. But it hasn’t worked out that way at all in Philadelphia. Since the program’s inception in late 2008, 583 suspects arrested here have been transferred into ICE custody for deportation. Of those, 348 were never convicted of a crime, and 480 had no prior criminal history or only minor non-violent misdemeanor convictions.

Kenney’s concern is twofold. First, he worries illegal immigrants will be more hesitant to report criminal activity to the police so long as ICE is peeking at the arrest records. Second, he thinks this does damage to Philadelphia’s reputation internationally, making it less likely that immigrants—including legal ones—will choose to settle in the city. “I don’t want us to be known as the city that deports,” Kenney says.

And so he got City Council to unanimously pass a resolution calling on Mayor Nutter, the court system and Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey not to renew the city agreement with ICE that enables Secure Communities. The agreement is set to expire August 31st.

It doesn’t look like Council’s view will win out. Everett Gillison, Nutter’s deputy mayor for public safety, is reviewing the program now, but he says “barring some change in our understanding or some new information, we will renew.” Last time around, the Nutter administration changed the terms of the agreement and some internal systems, which has stripped the names of victims and witnesses from the information transmitted to ICE. That’s a real improvement. But I expect the subtleties of the arrangement are lost on an illegal immigrant who witnessed a crime and has heard that Philly police share data with ICE.

Kenney thinks Nutter should follow the lead of Massachusetts, Illinois and the state of New York, all of which have declined to renew their Secure Communities agreements. The problem with this approach is that the federal government—after some hemming and hawing—now insists that participation is mandatory. Plus, all the information ICE gleans from the arrest reports has long been shared as a matter of course with the FBI (which, duh, is a federal entity). So it’s not clear what good it actually does Nutter to trash the renewal papers (and maybe irritate Washington while he’s at it). “This is the law. It is the federal law. We don’t do things for show,” Gillison says, when asked about the practicality of saying no to the feds.

I think the Nutter administration deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one. It has been, on the whole, friendly to immigrant communities, and it’s certainly clear to me that administration officials fully understand that immigration is an important piece of the Mayor’s goal of increasing the city’s population. “If you look at our entire body of work in the area of immigration, I think people would be hard-pressed to say we are hostile to it,” says Gillison.

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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Bill Green’s no good very bad week

by pkerkstra on June 22, 2011

There is a degree of anonymity in being one of 17, even when the one in question is a future mayoral contender like Councilman Bill Green. Mayors are poked and prodded daily: by the press, by their opponents, and above all by the 17 City Council members they must wrangle to force their agendas through.

Council members are rarely subjected to the same sort of examination, which makes a seat on council the ideal spot from which to take shots at the mayor. For reference, see: Councilman Michael Nutter and Mayor John Street, and, now, Councilman Bill Green and Mayor Michael Nutter.

For the most part, that’s fine. It’s inevitable and proper that the mayor gets more scrutiny than anyone else. But it is worthwhile to zoom in on figures like Green from time to time. And last week was a telling one for the Councilman.

Green’s week began with a confrontation with the Board of Ethics, and not for the first time. It’s not that Green was being brought up on some violation. Rather, it was a case of the Councilman objecting to Too Much Ethics. He felt the board had overstepped its bounds with plans to enforce a new law closing a campaign finance loophole differently—and more rigorously—than Council had intended.

What makes his objection interesting is that Green was the chief beneficiary of the loophole, which allowed political action committees to funnel money through other PACs to favored candidates above and beyond the annual donation limit, which last year was $10,600. The workaround enabled Green to collect at least $40,000 from Local 98, the John Dougherty-run electricians union, as reported by the Inquirer‘s Bob Warner.

Days after his ethics board challenge, Green played a central role in destroying the fragile coalition Nutter had assembled to pass his tax on sugary drinks. To get that done, though, Green had to get a little dirty. He traded one vote for another, and ended up supporting a bill—one requiring Philadelphia businesses to offer paid sick leave—that he was already on the record opposing as bad for business.

To top his week off, Green joined with the big council majority in opting to revise the wildly unpopular DROP pension perk, instead of killing it off completely as Nutter had called for.

All in all, not a great week for a councilman and future mayoral candidate who has cultivated an image as a pro-business budget hawk with a passion for accountability.

And Green knows it.

“I knew when I was doing these things I was going to have to polish up my armor again,” Green told me.

Green defends his calls last week thusly:

He challenged the ethics board, he said, because it was encroaching on “council’s power and prerogative, which I’ve defended at every turn. We can’t have regulatory bodies making law through regulations. Council makes the law.”

He flip-flopped on the sick leave bill, he said, because it was the only way to prevent the tax on soda. “Leadership is occasionally doing things you don’t want to do to get the best result for taxpayers,” Green said, noting also that the Mayor may well veto the bill.

And he voted to preserve DROP—in a slimmed-down form—because he thought he had a better chance to shape the legislation (which had plenty of support on council) from the inside. “I could either help craft the legislation and try to influence it to make it cost neutral, or I could be outside the room jumping up and down like the Mayor was.”

Fair enough. But how much longer can Green get away with being considered a crusading outsider bent on shaking up City Hall when he’s trading votes, fighting the ethics board and defending DROP? That’s not exactly rage against the machine material. It’s more like council’s default behavior.

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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Nutter bloodied

by pkerkstra on June 21, 2011

Nutter was bloodied badly in this latest round with Council. The guy has actually accomplished some things, but he’s so bad at the political end of the job that it’s sharply limiting his mayoralty. My take is in the Inquirer. Excerpt:

It’s getting harder and harder to find signs of the mayor that Michael Nutter wanted to be.

The man who won office as the city’s greatest tax-cutting champion is now the guy who is disappointed when City Council raises property taxes only 3.8 percent, instead of doubling the price of soda as he’d asked.

The mayor who made education the central theme of his inaugural address was forced to resort to a nine-page temper tantrum – CC’d to the world – to remind his own school board appointees that hello, he is the mayor and he does matter.

The politician who rallied the city around his cry of throwing the bums out of City Hall couldn’t even pass legislation killing DROP, the politically toxic retirement perk that cost Frank Rizzo his Council job.

Apart from the sting of defeat, the problem for Nutter with these ugly – and frequent – political humiliations is that they overshadow his administration’s actual accomplishments.

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Black, white, and increasingly irrelevant

by pkerkstra on June 8, 2011

After leaving the Inquirer, I spent five months on a project for PlanPhilly in eastern North Philadelphia, a neighborhood where black and Latino Philadelphia meet. It was a fascinating place, and I learned a lot covering the story. One of the lessons was this: City Hall doesn’t reflect the city any more. Philly’s power structure is so stuck in the old black/white dynamic of the past that it’s ignored – at its own peril, I think – the changing demographics of the city. If it weren’t for growing Asian and Latino populations, the city would have lost a lot of residents over the last ten years. Anyway, I looked at this issue for the Inquirer. Excerpt:

For most of Philadelphia’s history, the tense, delicate balance (and imbalance) between black and white has shaped and defined the city.

Political power, economic conditions, the city’s unique culture; all of it has flowed from the interplay between these two Philadelphias.

But it’s not that simple anymore. The latest census figures – which say 21 percent of city residents are now neither white nor African American – make it foolish to view Philadelphia through the binary racial prism of the past.

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Nutter, Ackerman split; the kids drove them to it

by pkerkstra on June 8, 2011

It looks like the strange, strained alliance between Mayor Nutter and Superintendent Arlene Ackerman is finally over, a victim of good news delivered at the wrong time. The split came Friday, when Ackerman announced—much to Nutter’s surprise—that she had found a way to fund all-day kindergarten despite the school district’s budget crisis.

This is, of course, a positive development. But it also robbed the mayor of his best argument for a tax hike to generate new cash for the schools. Kindergarten was his ace card in the coming showdown with council. He could say: Help me help the kids. Let’s reduce childhood obesity and rescue kindergarten with a soda tax.

Then Ackerman cut Nutter off at the knees. She found a way to use restricted federal funds to pay for kindergarten, and she didn’t tell Nutter about any of it until an hour ahead of the public announcement.

The Mayor looked out of the loop. Worse, he looked opportunistic. If full-day kindergarten could be salvaged with a little bureaucratic shuffling, what was he doing acting as though only tax hikes could save the children? He was, as Tom Ferrick likes to put it, threatening to kill the kitty.

And so Nutter, who had stood by Ackerman through her bungling of racial violence at South Philadelphia High, her mishandling of contracts and an ongoing federal audit (to name just a few controversies), hit Ackerman back. Hard.

In a nine-page letter delivered to Ackerman (and the press) Sunday night, Nutter demanded that the school district open its books. He demanded more city say in what the district does with its money. He implied that the district, and the School Reform Commission, was not sufficiently accountable to him and City Council.

The letter was a highly public takedown. It also came across as a guy letting off some steam, and finally saying things he pretty clearly has been thinking for a while. Nutter, more than just about any pol in this town, has a mania for transparency, accountability and process. I don’t mean to imply that his administration always practices what the Mayor preaches. It doesn’t. But Nutter rarely misses a chance to demand accountability from other players: the BRT, the Sheriff’s Office, the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

And yet he bit his tongue repeatedly for Ackerman’s sake. Some surmise it was to shore up his support in the African American community, particularly the city’s established black leadership. Others think it was because he was focused on test scores and graduation rates, where Ackerman has gotten results.

That’s all over now. In an interview with the Inquirer yesterday, Ackerman tried to mend fences. She apologized to the mayor. Kind of.

“I made an educational decision, which obviously had political fallout,” Ackerman told the Inquirer. “I had good intentions. I’m sorry for whatever embarrassment this caused for the Mayor.”

Translation: I did it for the kids. Unlike Nutter I wasn’t worried about petty things like politics.

Now it’s not really a big deal that the Mayor was embarrassed. Who cares about Nutter’s feelings, after all, if it means full-day kindergarten is back? But relationships matter in politics. And if the incident has cost Ackerman yet another ally, her highest-profile supporter of all, then it is a very big deal. Without Nutter at her back, how much longer will Ackerman collect a paycheck in this town?

(This originally appeared in PhillyPost)

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Nutter’s humiliation

by pkerkstra on May 18, 2011

The dozen or so Philadelphia voters who turned out  yesterday provided answers to a few questions I raised ahead of Tuesday’s election.

1. Was Michael Nutter embarrassed?
Oh yeah. Milton Street took about 24 percent of the vote, just a shade below the admittedly arbitrary 25 percent marker some people (like myself) had set as the humiliation hurdle. But just as important as the votes Street got were the ones nobody got. Of the 196,000 Philadelphians who voted, Nutter got just 111,000 votes. Republican candidates accounted for only about 16,000 votes, and Street got just 35,000. That means over 30,000 voters couldn’t bring themselves to pull the lever for Nutter or Street, a figure that is surely tempting John Street, Tom Knox and maybe some others mulling over Independent campaigns against Nutter in November.

The election also underscored how big a problem Nutter has with poor and working-class African American voters. In some predominantly black North Philadelphia wards, Street collected 40 percent of the vote.

A caveat. An election like this, with pathetic turnout and no viable opponent to contrast himself with, is not a perfect reflection of how the broader city electorate feels about Nutter. But it says something alright.

2. Whither the GOP?
Frank Rizzo lost. That’s really all you need to know to understand the massive changes now taking place in the city’s Republican Party. In fact, Rizzo was destroyed, placing seventh in the GOP at-large City Council race.

The momentum now seems entirely with the reform wing of the city GOP, which has sought for several years now to oust the old leadership, which is pretty cozy with the Democratic party. Al Schmidt, the unofficial leader of that insurgency, won one of two GOP nominations for City Commissioner. David Oh, who is considered another Republican reformer, was the top vote-getter in the at-large GOP council race. The Republican mayoral primary is still too close for me to call, with less than 100 votes separating party-backed Karen Brown from reformer John Featherman.

3. Did reform voters show?
Not on the Democratic side, not really. Yes, DROP mascot Marge Tartaglione appears to have narrowly lost her re-election bid. But otherwise all Democratic incumbents were re-elected (albeit narrowly in some cases), and the candidates who won nominations in open seats were generally backed by established figures like Nutter and John Dougherty.

4. So who won the Doc-Nutter City Council faceoff?
I’m calling this a split decision. Bobby Henon, Dougherty’s candidate in the sixth district, trounced Nutter-backed Marty Bednarek. But seventh district incumbent Maria Quinones-Sanchez, who Nutter endorsed, beat back Doc-supported Daniel Savage. There is no question that Dougherty will wield more influence in the next council, but a lot of his candidates—like Bill Green and Mark Squilla—were endorsed, at least on paper, by Nutter as well.

5. How diverse is the new council?
Not very. Sanchez’s re-election means council will retain its sole Latino member, but Asian Democratic at-large candidate Andy Toy fell short despite a well-funded, slick campaign. On the GOP side, David Oh’s strong showing suggests he has an excellent chance of becoming City Council’s first Asian representative.

Bonus question I didn’t ask, but should have: How pissed are voters really about DROP?
Very, very pissed. Had they never enrolled in DROP, I bet Rizzo and Tartaglione both would have won re-election.

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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In praise of the Philadelphia Parking Authority

by pkerkstra on May 10, 2011

No, really. I mean it. To a point. My column for the Inquirer is here. Excerpt:

What if – and it pains me to write this – the Parking Authority is right and the rest of us are wrong? I’m not talking about the agency’s patronage record and exorbitant executive salaries, which are indefensible. But, rather, its view that parking, particularly in a dense urban setting such as Philadelphia, is a limited resource that should be costly and rigorously policed.

This position starts to make a lot of sense when you look at parking as a commodity like any other, instead of some sort of natural right.

Land has value. Land at, say, 18th and Walnut Streets has a ton of value. So when a driver parks a Cadillac Escalade the size of a small BYOB in an open spot in Center City, he or she really ought to be paying full market rate for the privilege.

The trouble is, the true market rate of parking has been so thoroughly obscured by government regulations and subsidies (which dwarf those for mass transit) that drivers often feel outraged even when asked to pay a relative pittance for street parking, such as the $2 an hour the PPA charges on its busiest blocks.

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Absurd GOP primary a fight for party’s Philly future

by pkerkstra on May 10, 2011

Pity the neglected Republican Philadelphia mayoral candidates. They have no chance at actually winning elected office. Their motives for running are constantly questioned. And their best shot at getting some media attention is to rob a bank.

One of the candidates, real estate agent John Featherman, has resorted to provocative online-only “ads” to get someone, anyone, to pay attention to the race. And I do mean provocative. His latest features a stripper and a pair of cigar-smoking party bosses. It is arguably NSFW. An earlier spot from Featherman was far more subtle: It starred Moammar Gadhafi, who was being offered asylum in Philadelphia.

Featherman’s opponent, Karen Brown, has had an easier time attracting press, but mostly because she’s declared bankruptcy four times, and faced foreclosure action five times. Oh, and she was a Democratic committeewoman until about 15 minutes before the filing deadline for the primary election, when GOP party bosses enlisted her to run.

Brown attributes her financial woes to her husband’s health problems, which were certainly grave. She has a harder time, though, explaining her switch in parties. Brown says city spending is out of control. But she also laments the cuts to government services: reductions in police and fire budgets (police and firefighters should be paid more, she says, not less), the school funding crisis and aid to seniors like her mother. It’s political schizophrenia. She wants big government with low taxes.

Plus—and maybe I’m being petty here—she can’t spell. Or at any rate, her campaign can’t. Take a look at the “action plan” on her website, where she calls for the city to “diverate” money to basic services and “Revise all Business Taxes through Cost Cutting Measures within City Hall and Hiring Incentatives.” Sic all of that: the grammar, the spelling, the random capitalization.

Believe it or not, though, this absurd primary is not all farce. Brown vs. Featherman is really a campaign pitting the old city GOP interests—the guard led by Michael Meehan, and represented in this case by Brown—against insurgent Republicans who want the organization to work at becoming a viable opposition party, instead of the subservient bit player it has been for decades.

Featherman, the insurgent candidate, got beat up a little bit by fellow Philly Post blogger Larry Mendte when Featherman admitted he wasn’t in the race to take out Michael Nutter. But I give the guy credit for recognizing the obvious and for copping to his real objective.

“My goal is to win the primary so I can legitimately say ‘the machine is dead, and Meehan, I respectfully ask you to step aside,’” Featherman told me.

Although totally lacking in taste, Featherman’s latest ad effectively makes the case that the city GOP exists largely to consume whatever patronage crumbs the Democrats throw its way. That arrangement works well for the leadership of both parties, but it’s hard to see how it’s healthy for the city as a whole. How much better off would Philadelphia’s political culture be if the GOP could muster a candidate as qualified and legitimate as Sam Katz every four years?

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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Fighting blight in spartan times

by pkerkstra on May 3, 2011

It’s not what you could really call a comprehensive redevelopment plan, not yet, but for the first time since Mayor Nutter took office, his administration is developing a coherent plan for helping out some of Philadelphia’s neediest neighborhoods. It’s called Philly Rising, and it’s showing some real promise.

Until now, it’s been hard to discern what, exactly, the Nutter administration was doing to help out the city’s most-troubled blocks. Though some would surely say otherwise, the problem wasn’t lack of concern. City officials—including a lot of bright folks from Fels—spent a lot of time analyzing data and looking at maps (former Managing Director Camille Barnett is very fond of maps) that charted out all that ails Philadelphia’s most distressed neighborhoods.

Somehow, though, all that earnest analysis didn’t lead to many improvements on the ground. Then, a little over a year ago, at the suggestion of Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, the administration began trying something new.

The approach was modest—in budget (there is none, really) and scope (just five square blocks at a time)—but it was rooted in a novel concept. The city would first ask residents what the neighborhood needed, and then get them to commit to helping the city make the changes happen.

“We’re not coming in with a ton of money. I think the biggest change is we’re treating the people in these areas as partners rather than as clients of the city or service recipients,” said John Farrell, a deputy city managing director who is heading up Philly Rising.

There are a few challenges here. The first is in getting city departments and agencies—not all of which answer directly to Mayor Nutter—to participate. Another is convincing local residents and community groups, many of whom have little faith in the city, to buy in. In Hartranft, where Philly Rising got its start, those challenges largely seem to have been overcome. Violent crime in the neighborhood declined by 16 percent last year, far better than the rest of the police district.

The neighborhood also has a new computer lab, a reclaimed public pool (it was there all along, just not in use) and empty lots where once 14 crumbling, abandoned buildings stood, serving as havens for drug dealers.

The computer lab is a good example of how Philly Rising works. Farrell cadged the computers from Temple University, which was replacing the machines with newer models, and convinced the local elementary school to open a section of the building up at night to local adults trying to get their GEDs. Since the lab is staffed entirely by neighborhood volunteers, the community now has a significant new asset at virtually no cost to the public.

Make no mistake. NTI this is not. There will be no big bonds for acquiring and clearing vacant land, no major new departmental outlays. To date, it has been funded purely out of the existing budget, and Nutter has asked Council for just a half million more next year to expand the program.

Farrell is optimistic that the city can move the needle on crime and quality of life problems in a meaningful way with this approach. I wonder, though, if Philly Rising can really work on a larger scale. I get that city departments can give a little extra here and there to help out a few neighborhoods at a time without big new budget outlays. I’m skeptical it can be done in dozens of neighborhoods at once, without it showing up on the bottom line.

But I hope I’m wrong. And, at minimum, the effort looks like it has given some direction and renewed vigor to the Nutter administration’s neighborhood strategy.

(This originally appeared on PhillyPost)

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