|
|
|
News
Here's an electoral tidbit for you: tomorrow, Friday, will make it just four whole days from the election and four whole days since the date Philadelphia City Commissioner Stephanie Singer said the commissioners would clear a backlog of unprocessed voter registrations.
And with just days to go, the backlog, as far as this reporter knows, has not been cleared. It wasn't cleared as of yesterday morning, when the City Commissioners didn't convene for their usual Wednesday meeting, which was canceled earlier in the week; and it wasn't cleared as of yesterday evening, when City Commissioner Al Schmidt confirmed to City Paper that the commissioners' staff were alternating between processing absentee ballots and new voter registrations, which were due on Oct. 9.
Schmidt, the only City Commissioner to return City Paper's emails and calls since yesterday, promised that the registrations will be processed before the election.
One of the biggest winners of the 2011 May primary elections was never on the ballot. That would be John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty, business manager of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98, Philly union boss, and the man behind the money that backed several successful City Council campaigns. And that success might be starting to pay off.
Early in October, Councilman Bobby Henon, who represents the city's 6th District (lower Northeast neighborhoods), introduced a bill in City Council that's gotten little attention so far, but which could have big implications – and which might reflect the heightened influence of city trade unions within Council.
The bill, 120776 – co-sponsored by Councilman Henon, At-Large Councilman Jim Kenney, and Council President Darrell Clarke – substantially adds to the city's laws governing contractors, imposing new requirements over permits and workplace information and also imposing new, substantial enforcement penalties.
Councilman Henon told City Paper last week that the bill is aimed at targeting an “underground economy” of unlicensed, tax-dodging, and rule breaking construction contractors. Though Henon noted that his bill had already been in the works, he acknowledged City Controller Alan Butkovitz's announcement last week of an audit of illegal construction activities in North Philly as an example of why the bill was needed. Last summer, this author wrote a cover story about rampant and seemingly illegal construction practices near Temple University ("Land Grab," June 28, 2012).
While Henon says that “no one came to me asking” for the bill, it's worth noting influence of city trade unions, especially Local 98 and its boss, John Doughtery in Henon's election and in the rise of 5th District Councilman Darrell Clarke to the presidency of City Council. Dougherty and the Political Action Committee he controls spent vast amounts of money for (and against) various candidates for City Council who showed willingness to support a Doc ticket and a Clarke presidency.
While touring North Philly development, I came more than once across Local 98 members actively protesting (non-union) construction projects in that neighborhood. This bill would undoubtedly advance the interest of Philly's trade unions by giving the city new powers to crack down on contractors.
Here are a few highlights:
* The bill would require that contractors be granted licenses only if: All city tax obligations are satisfied, the applicant is “financially solvent,” the applicant “is not debarred by any public body or governmental agency,” and the applicant is “in compliance with all applicable laws of the Commonwealth relating to the operation of business.”
* Contractors, currently required to display their contractor license on “advertisements and Contractor stationary.” This bill requires that the contractor and commercial activity licenses be displayed (in letters at least two inches high) on: advertisements, stationary, the contractor's main place of business, job sites, proposals and contracts, and “vehicles used during the course of business.”
* “Prime” contractors will be required to submit to the Department of Licenses and Inspections and post on-site “a list of all subcontractors of any tier used on the project with their respective contractor license numbers and commercial activity license numbers.”
* The bill holds “any contractor or subcontractor who hires independent contractors that have not paid any fees or taxes required to be paid to the City … liable for the payment of such fees and taxes.”
* The bill allows the Department of L&I to “seize any vehicles, equipment or tools used at a work site by any person or business entity working as an unlicensed contractor in violation of this Section.” Such vehicles would be subject to forfeiture.
If passed, the bill would seemingly require the Department of L&I -- which has pointed out in response to previous reports of illegal construction activity that it has fewer than 50 inspectors for the entire city -- to enforce and enact these provisions. L&I officials declined to comment on the bill for this post, as did the mayor's spokesman, Mark McDonald, who said that the administration will present any opinions on the bill as testimony when it is heard in Council.
Councilman Henon says he expects hearings in November.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Republican Governor Tom Corbett is deciding whether or not to sign legislation that would require some workers to pay taxes to their bosses. Yes, you read that right. The bill, which would allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers' withheld income tax, is an effort to to recruit Oracle to the state.
Your taxes would get withheld by your boss like normal, but they would then keep them and spend it on private jets or monogrammed bathroom fixtures or whatever instead of turning them over to the state--turning your tax dollars over to the state being the whole reason they were ostensibly "withheld" in the first place.
In some sense making workers pay taxes directly to their boss is just cutting out the middleman: lavish corporate welfare in the form of taxpayer subsidies to business is the norm. States fall over each other in a rush to make themselves look the most appealing--meaning low taxes and wages alongside weak labor and environmental protection--and then sweeten the deal with specially-tailored giveaways to lure specific companies (see Corbett's $1.6 billion tax credit to Shell oil).
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Republican Attorney General candidate and Cumberland County district attorney David Freed traded law-and-order boasts with Democrat and former assistant Lackawanna County district attorney Kathleen Kane at Monday night's debate. Freed said he would crack down on child molesters, cyber crimes and the "newest menace on the streets: synthetic drugs."
Kane, who has consistently led in polls and would be the first woman and Democrat voted into the office, hammered Freed for an ad run on his behalf that incorrectly accused her of being "soft" on rape, citing the case of a young victim that Kane actually had almost no connection to. The victim's father condemned the ad and Factcheck.org called it "one of the most blatantly false attack ads of the political season."
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America Local 38010 yesterday filed a grievance over The Philadelphia Inquirer's "irrational and seemingly punitive reassignments of 12 veteran journalists."
As City Paper reported yesterday, Interstate General Media, which owns the Inquirer, Daily News, and Philly.com, is accused of reassigning older reporters to undesirable beats and locations in an effort to force them out. They have confirmed these suspicions over the last two weeks by offering a new round of buyouts and hiring three young reporters.
Veteran mafia reporter George Anastasia (who had not been reassigned) has taken the buyout, as have theater critic Howie Shapiro and science writer Faye Flam (both of whom were reassigned). Multiple sources inside and close to the company tell CP that newsroom morale has hit rock bottom.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Vernon Clark, a city writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, will now pen obituaries. Meanwhile, obituary writer Walter Naedele is shipping out to report on Chester Country, Pa. Projects editor Kathy Hacker will, well, write obituaries.
Endings seem to be the order of the day at the newspaper, under new ownership since April. Management's dizzying reassignment of a dozen-odd mostly older and thus more expensive newsroom staffers is, according to sources inside the company, a transparent effort to encourage them to quit.
"The company does have a right to reassign reporters or editors to work in different areas or cover different things," says Daily News gossip columnist and Greater Philadelphia Newspaper Guild President Dan Gross. Interstate General Media owns The Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. "But the sudden reassignment of this group of people, all of whom are of a certain age and have a certain length of service with the company, raises an eyebrow. And we will monitor the new assignments and the situations, and the demands that are placed on these employees.”
Councilman Bill Green introduced a bill in City Council today that would require all city websites and web applications to be compatible with various Internet browsers.
Currently, some functions on the city's website are accessible only using Internet Explorer — including "Econtracts" the online destination for those who seek to do business with the city, and the Department of Revenue's online system for payment of business income tax.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Philadelphia Public School sophomore Samantha Pawlucy has received nationwide and even global attention after a teacher allegedly mocked her for wearing a Mitt Romney T-shirt to class. This, if proven true, clearly merits some outrage.
Samantha's father, Richard Pawlucy, has been eager to take the outrage a step further, turning the incident into an indictment of a liberal, and even un-American, school. " Sometimes they don't fly their flags," Pawlucy told the Philadelphia Daily News. "There's nothing in the school, nothing patriotic, at least, though there probably is now. I asked my daughter about the Pledge of Allegiance and she said, 'What's that?'"
Pawlucy has portrayed himself to the media as an apolitical dad pushed into the election-year fracas by his daughter's tormenters. According to The Inquirer's Karen Heller, "he has never voted before, which makes him an improbable participant in a political fight." Indeed, he says that he would have voted for Obama in 2008.
This past summer, City Paper featured a cover story by yours truly about development gone wild in North Central Philly, mostly around Temple University where a veritable gold rush to build student housing has been underway.
Among this reporter's findings were dozens, if not hundreds of instances of blatant violations of construction and other regulations:
Walk in any direction on almost any block between 19th Street and Broad near Temple’s campus and you’ll find plenty more where that came from: sites improperly fenced, dried cement in the gutters, piles of construction debris illegally dumped in city-owned vacant lots, construction sites without posted permits, permits without street accommodations, development without much regard for anyone — including, apparently, for the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections, which should be issuing violations for all of the above.
The Department of Licenses and Inspections did, at the time, say that it was stepping up enforcement efforts in the area -- but now it looks like there'll be a new fire burning under developers' feet: Today, the office of City Controller Alan Butkovitz announced a press conference set for tomorrow to discuss "a special review of construction activity in North Central Philadelphia, near Temple University."
Given the Controller's job of pointing out inefficiencies, misspending and city snafoos, the review isn't likely to be a "two thumbs up." We'll keep you posted.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
The Pennsylvania Department of Education has made it easier for charter schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on standardized tests, in what seems like an effort to make them look better than traditional public schools.
Public schools are evaluated by whether they meet certain test score targets in each grade tested. Under the changes, implemented by Education Secretary Ron Tomalis without federal approval, charter schools would only have to meet those goals in one of three groupings of grades: 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This means that a charter school's 3-5 and 6-8 graders could perform abysmally as long as high schoolers scored well.
An Allentown Morning Call investigation found that the new scoring method may provide a false impression that charters outperformed traditional public schools last year. A 2011 Stanford University study found that charters performed worse over all.
This isn't the first time the administration of Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been accused of giving charters special treatment, as City Paper reported last month. A new state law requiring that test scores be included in teacher evaluations only applies to teachers at traditional public schools--and excludes charters. So much for accountability.
The quiet changes made to charter school evaluation is particularly striking given that public school test scores plummeted last year. Secretary Tomalis credited his crackdown on standardized test cheating. But the cheating was most likely prompted not by lax rules, but by the increasingly high stakes of standardized tests. And others, including a member of his own advisory committee, contradicted his assertion that major budget cuts to education had not impact. Gov. Corbett's cuts fueled the elimination of 3,800 teacher and staff positions in districts statewide.
- ActiVman
- adventures
- Arts
- Ask A Man-About-Town
- Award Tour
- Awards
- Bad Idea Factory
- Beer
- Below the Curve
- Bikes
- Booze
- Brian Hickey
- BRT
- Budget
- Budget Fuss
- Business
- Casinos
- City Council
- City Hall
- CouncilMANIC
- CP Abroad
- CP in the Community
- Criminal Justice System
- Day Tripper
- Death and Taxes
- Delaware River
- Design
- DROP
- Drugs
- Dubious Distinction
- Elections
- End of Days
- Environment
- Fashion
- Film Fest
- Financial Meltdown
- FrackTrack
- Free Library
- Gambling
- Gay Stuff
- Get Lit
- Greenstorming
- guns
- Hall Monitor
- Health
- Health Care
- Hello, Kitty
- Holidays
- Ice Cubes
- Iggles
- Immigration
- In Memoriam
- Labor
- Lawsuits
- Letters
- LGBTQ
- Maps
- Marcellus Shale
- Media
- MMA
- Mummers
- Music
- MUST READ
- Mysterious Mysteries
- Nation
- News
- Non Sequitur
- Opinion
- PA politics 2010
- Parking Wars
- Parks and Recreation
- People Send Us This Stuff
- Philadelphia Police
- Philadelphia Union
- Philaphemera
- Philly From Scratch
- philly madness
- Photos
- Poverty
- PPA
- President Obama
- Print Edition
- Prisons
- Protest
- Readers Write
- Real Estate
- Rock Bottom
- Schools
- Science
- Screwing Philly
- SEPTA
- snow
- So Lush
- Soccer
- Sporting Life
- Sports Complex
- State Politicians
- State Politics
- Street Art
- Strike
- Stuff We Like
- Taxes
- Taxi Drivers
- Tech Fetish
- television
- The Budget Crisis
- The City Paper
- The CLOG
- The Human Condition
- The Mayor
- The Phightin Phils
- The World
- Things that make you go hm
- Tinfoil Hats Off
- Under the Table
- Under the Tables
- Urban Development
- Urban Planning
- urban wildlife
- Video Poker
- We Call Shenanigans
- Weather
- Web Junk
- Weekend Omnibus
- White House
- What We've Found
- Women's Issues
- Flyered Up!
- How 'Bout That Weather?
- it's always sunny in philadelphia
- Stu!
- Shopping
- get out
- 10-track mind
- ArtsFlash
- Bloggity
- Bruce Being Bruce
- Colleges
- Comedy
- Gigantic Surprises
- Hello Canary
- Hello Puppy
- errata
- get lost
- Inside The Fishbowl
- Library Closings
- Local Support
- Movies
- Murder
- Night Moves
- Recycling
- radio
- Scientology
- Sex
- Sixers
- Skeeze Police
- State Politicians Screwing Philly
- That's a cool stencil!
- Theater
- Things We See
- This Week
- This Week in Oates
- University City
- WIN
- What we don't heart
- trailer!
- what we heart
- Feeling Guilty
- Askadelphia.
- Broke in Philly
- Contest
- Dance
- Dear Paper Doll
- Do A Good Thing
- Education
- Film Fest Schism
- G20-20 Vision
- Goodbye
- Gossip
- Great American Heroes
- PATCO
- Pearl Jam Week
- Puppy
- Stars of the Photostream
- sustainability
- Lower Merion Webcam-Gate
- The Cycle
- Equality Forum
- Bureaucrat of the Week
- Animals
- ElectionEar
- Photostream
