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Archive: January, 2013
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[updated]
Negotations between the union representing Inquirer and Daily News reporters and the owners of Interstate General Media have gotten nasty pretty fast: the union, in an email to members, accuses management of demanding a "poison pill" that would undermine seniority, even after the union had proposed what they describe as significant financial concessions via a buyout package.
Yesterday, City Councilman James Kenney introduced legislation for a ballot initiative to make the Philadelphia Office of the Inspector General an independent branch of city government. Currently, the Mayor appoints the Inspector General and can just as easily remove him or her, setting the office's budget and theoretically able to direct its agenda. The bill would provide for a more independent office that negotiates its own budget with City Council, and requiring a hearing to remove the Inspector General before the end of his or her five-year term.
Philadelphia's Inspector General, Amy Kurland, says that the perils of having her office tied to closely to that of the Mayor's are not just hypothetical. When you look at how the office, tasked with unearthing corruption and fraud in city government, functioned under previous administrations, the consequences of that political influence appear to have played out already.
"There have been Inspectors General before me, and they were hardworking, good people, but no office has ever had the kind of support Mayor Nutter has given to our office. So who knows what could have been done in the past," Kurland says.
City Paper is happy to announce that Ryan Briggs joins us as a staff writer, beginning on Monday, Jan. 28. Briggs comes to us from being a fellow at the urban-issues online journal Next City (until recently known as Next American City, but a newly expanded international focus prompted a name change). At Next City he covered local planning and development issues for their blog and wrote long-form features. He's also been a contributing writer for Metropolis, the Philly website (edited by former long-time Inquirer reporter, editor and columnist Tom Ferrick) that publishes investigative pieces, commentary and essays. For Metropolis, Briggs has explored the world of Kensington flophouses and the Philly government oddity of "walking around money," what Briggs calls "a piggy bank for the city's political class." He's a Temple grad who was once a mayor's intern, a fact that we kinda love.
Send him tips! You can reach him at ryan.briggs@citypaper.net.
Like literally ON the bus. This video is NSFW if your W doesn't want you to watch videos of naked dudes running around under the El.
Rested from their winter vacation, City Council members were fired up today over a number of issues. Among them: Whether to override a veto by Mayor Nutter of a change to civic groups' role in the zoning process, and whether to demand a yearlong moratorium on school closings, a hot-button issue that brought out dozens of protesters.
Council voted 13-3 to override the mayor's veto on updated rules for Registered Community Organizations (RCOs) that would, among other things, increase the demands on developers to notify the community of projects and put a greater burden on the generally volunteer-run civic groups to notify residents of meetings. The bill was passed in the first place against the advice of the City Planning Commission.
Councilman Bill Green said the bill would create "notice requirements that are almost impossible to legally comply with. They will hold up projects in the courts for years. ... This will create legal road blocks to development and job creation." Most dramatically: "We will all rue the day when this veto was overridden."
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Workers and labor advocates flanked City Council President Darrell Clarke and Councilman Bill Greenlee this morning to support a bill mandating paid-sick leave for workers. Greenlee thinks he has better odds than in 2011, when Mayor Michael Nutter vetoed legislation passed by council.
A representative of Comcast, who has clocked serious time lobbying against the bill, was spotted at the press conference. Greenlee says that he is willing to dialog with business leaders, who contend that the bill will drive up costs.
"But one thing we're not going to do is not do this bill," he said.
The headline was this: "Phony Front Group Staging Philly Paid Sick Leave Rally," in reference to the Restaurant Opportunities Center's (ROC) support of Councilman William Greenlee's mandatory paid sick leave legislation, which was vetoed in 2011 but is to be re-introduced in City Council today. It was a funny kind of press release to get, coming from a mystery organization that itself might be termed a "front group," supposedly for publicity-shy restaurateurs.
The Restaurant Opportunities Center, which was born in New York and is a relatively recent arrival in Philly, makes no secret of the fact that its goal is to organize restaurant workers for better conditions and fairer pay. You know, kind of like a union. But anyway, in case you didn't get it, a group called ROC Exposed wants to clear that up for you. Per the press release:
ROC—which was originally named the Restaurant Organizing Center—is a labor union front group disguised as a restaurant industry employment center. ROC’s co-founder describes its goal as organizing “the 99 percent of the [restaurant] industry that doesn’t have a union.”
The paid sick leave law that ROC wants could also harm Philadelphia’s employees. In San Francisco, a survey found that nearly 30 percent of low-paid employees reported fewer hours or even layoffs after the passage of a mandatory paid sick leave law. This is the last thing that Philadelphia and its 10.1 percent unemployment rate needs.
Brett Mandel, who's planning another run for City Controller, has been advocating for the office to be more active and transparent for years. Well, he deserves some credit for taking matters into his own hands, by putting online a database of city expenditures that he says accounts for the entirety of the budget from 2012. In addition to viewing individuals' salaries, you can also look at an accounting of expenses. Which tends to reveal fun facts, like that someone in the Public Health Department got an $800 office chair, or that the Prisons System bought a number of comfy-sounding seating options in the $560 range.
Or, as Mandel's press release puts it:
By using the Mandel for Controller Bulldog Budget, users can find out that:
· The city spent nearly $3,000 on a plasma tv last year
· The city spent nearly $4,000 on bottled water
· The city spent nearly $7,000 on "pet therapy."
· The city spent more than $400,000 on lobbying.
· The city paid out more than $2 million in breach-of-contract payouts
· The city spent nearly $4 million paying out cases involving "sidewalk falls."
· The city paid out more than $14 million after "civil rights" cases.
Today, at noon at the State Capitol in Harrisburg, there will be (at least) two rallies: One, by gun-owners calling themselves PA Responsible Citizens "to reinforce the fact that RESPONSIBLE and ORDINARY CITIZENS own and carry firearms"; the second, by CeaseFirePA, calling for responsible, "common sense reforms." In an arena where marginalization of wing-nut opponents has long been the name of the game, it looks like everyone is scrambling to stake out the middle ground.
PA Responsible Citizens asked attendees not to carry any "long guns" at the rally. As Dan Kelley reports in the issue of City Paper out tomorrow, they're not the only ones.
Spell-check. It has saved many a student from the wrath of teachers. Could it save the Republic from gun-snatchin’ liberals?
Organizers of a gun-rights demonstration at the State Capitol over the weekend, wary of public-relations faux pas, seemed to think so. Guns Across America, which contends that wide availability of firearms leads to less crime, urged followers to look the part: Don’t wear camouflage, spell-check those signs and no rifles. “They wanted to promote kind of, like, ‘everyday folks’ dressed in their normal clothes,” says Mike Novak, a volunteer with the group’s Pennsylvania chapter. “We aren’t a bunch of weirdos.”
A weekly series of foul-mouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at Philaphilia.blogspot.com.
1020-26 Cherry St. -- What the fuck? The small area that is the main part of Chinatown (not the North part or Western piece above the Convention Center) is so goddamn crowded that old buildings are getting additional floors tacked on top just to make everyone fit. Nonetheless, there's an assload of surface parking lots scattered all over this little district. Here's the story of just one of them.
This is yet another lot that was way more occupied in 1850 than it is now. Back then, a large lawn filled most of the lot, with a squat two-story rectangular building toward the back. This little building was rented by the primordial School District of Philadelphia and used as a co-ed primary school. The tiny street behind it, now called the 1000 block of Appletree Street, was the original Academy Street, probably named so to describe the school that sat on the site of the lot. Nowadays, the same name (as Academy Road) is used to describe a major arterial in the "Great" Norfeast.
In 1870, the School District got tired of renting this crappy little building so they purchased the lot and built a brand new school building to take the old one's place. They named it the John Agnew School. The design was a common one for the city's schools in that era. This was one of many by architect Lewis H. Esler, who served as the Superintendent of Public School Buildings and Repairs from 1869-1883.
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| The John Agnew School as it appeared in 1897. Source: Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project |
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