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Labor activists are delivering a "petition to City Council urging council members to stand with Philadelphia’s working families, not corporate lobbyists" ahead of tomorrow's vote on legislation that would require many employers to offer employees paid sick leave.
Activists have recently focused their campaign on Comcast, which spent $108,429.25 lobbying Council on paid sick leave in 2012, according to Philadelphia's Media Mobilizing Project.
The petition is signed by 60,000 people, including 14,000 who identified themselves as Comcast customers.
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.
Spanning the Powelton Yards and Schuylkill River at Powelton Avenue -- Where it would be if it was ever built? Original aerial from Google.
Ya know, it's one thing to have a Dead-Ass Proposal that was active for five, 10 or even 20 years. That's shitty in itself. But a Dead-Ass Proposal brought up again and again and AGAIN over the course of nearly 90 years? That's rigoddamndiculous!!!! Well, that's this one. This bridge proposal was attempted numerous times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and failed every last time. This is the Powelton Avenue Bridge.
Brainchild of a Badass
The first time a Powelton Avenue Bridge was suggested was in 1869. The Common Council of the City of Philadelphia passed a resolution on April 17th of that year, asking for plans regarding several bridge-related projects, including a bridge spanning the Schuylkill at Powelton Avenue. They got a response by the great city engineer/surveyor Stickland Kneass, who had just spent five years completing his masterpiece, the great cast-iron Chestnut Street Bridge. This Kneass guy was a badass who must have been able to see the future. He was the son of an engraver for the U.S. Mint and was personally educated by one of the world's top scientists. He knew that the existing Schuylkill crossings of his time would never be enough to serve all the traffic of the distant decades to come.
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Some fact checking by WHYY's Dave Davies revealed that a Washington D.C. tax report ranking Philadelphia as the city with the second highest taxes for families contained faulty property tax data that apparently made us look worse than we are. The City Paper covered this report last week.
A spokesmen for Washington D.C.'s municipal Office of the Budget, which assembled the report, said that they relied on official data from each city examined in the survey and, understandably, did not conduct an independent review of all 51 cities' own statistics on taxation for accuracy. Philadelphia's official numbers appear to have been out of date and not reflective of average property tax payments.
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The Disability Rights Network of Pennsylvania announced today that it was suing the state Department of Corrections for violating the Eighth Amendment, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. The suit alleges that the use of "Restricted Housing Units" (RHUs), better known as solitary confinement, is unconstitutional when applied to seriously mentally ill prisoners, something the DRN claims is standard practice in Penna. correctional facilities.
In a press release today, the DRN outlined abusive practices that it says adversely affects some 800 prisoners that are diagnosed as mentally ill, but who continue to be punished with solitary confinement for behavior that is often a manifestation of their illness. The group alleges that the state is aware that solitary confinement can "exacerbate the symptoms of mental illness", causing "sleeplessness, hallucinations, and paranoia", but continues the punishment nonetheless. In worst case scenarios, solitary confinement has been known to catalyze self-destructive behavior, like head-banging, cutting and suicide attempts The suit says such behavior is often perversely addressed with more RHU time. Nearly half of all prison suicides nationwide occur while the incarcerated are being held in solitary.
The long dilapidated Trenton China Pottery building at 105 N. 2nd St. is being sold to yet another undisclosed buyer, according to a source with knowledge of the transaction.
One of Old City's most visible blighted properties (actually a series of nine separate structures grouped as a single parcel, encompassing some 55,000 square feet), the one-time home of a local restaurant-supply company has been rotting for the better part of a decade.
Neighbors' hopes were high when an group of "local investors" bought the package of buildings in 2011 for $1.4 million, with intentions of converting the upper floors into residential units. That company, listed on city property records as Pottery Works, LP, appears to headed by a Huntingdon Valley-based landlord named Isaac "Jack" Azran.
Among those who may benefit from the citywide property tax reassessment process (known as the Actual Value Initiative or AVI) are people whose homes have declined in value, Center City commercial property owners who're seeing tax bills plummet — and, most likely, lawyers. The city expects the number of appeals to spike by 50 percent this year, but the number could be greater if everyone being egged on to appeal by AVI critics like Councilmen Mark Squilla and Jim Kenney does so. Adding fuel to the fire are lawyers who are urging those who feel they're overassessed to seek legal counsel, with blog posts, "legal alerts," and free online advice, such as "Should you appeal? We think so,"
One firm, Fineman Krekstein & Harris even took the step of leaving stacks of fliers in Center City condo buildings in recent weeks. Lawyer Gary Krimstock says the firm has received "dozens of calls every day" since the assessments were mailed out, and he expects "hundreds, if not more." He says that in previous years that saw extensive increases in assessments, such as in 2002 and 2006, the firm filed upwards of 3,300 appeals per year. He's not sure whether he'll be filing that many this year, or whether he'll be able to represent whole buildings in informal discussions with the Office of Property Assessment (OPA) as he has in the past.
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Councilwoman Marian B. Tasco railed against the Inquirer for publishing the details of a leaked state report on alleged misspending and misconduct on the part of the Ogontz Avenue Revitalization Corporation (OARC), a group with extensive ties to founder and state Rep. Dwight Evans.
Equating the Inky's coverage of the allegations to the recent, heavily criticized "Being White in Philadelphia" cover story from Philadelphia magazine (while applauding the City Paper's "excellent" rebuttal to said cover story), the councilwoman suggested that the Inquirer article was part of "an organized strategy to weaken the political and social safety net in Philadelphia's African-American community, much like the national attack on ACORN."
Philly's vacant land problem — and how to get more of those lots back on the tax rolls, especially in light new tax bills arrive from the citywide property-tax re-assessments — was a center of attention at City Council this morning. Council President Darrell Clarke moved forward with a package of "Rebuilding Philadelphia" bills, designed to incentivize development on blighted land.
And, Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez and Councilman Bill Green reintroduced legislation that's been in the works for more than a year to create a land bank to hold and dispose of city land, a long-awaited innovation. Currently, land is owned by various agencies including the city, the Redevelopment Authority and the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp., and it often takes months or years to clear a property for purchase. The land bank would have written policies, a board, a one-step approval process and flexible pricing, all things that are rather unfamiliar to those currently attempting to acquire city-owned land.
Sources say he's defensively responsible and totes adorbs. (Seen at Happily Ever After on Pine Street)
Oh, man, and there's actual breaking Flyers news going on right now: Pronger's taking questions. Watch it live here.
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A spokesman for the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority confirmed that the agency will be auctioning off as many as 25 city-owned lots (shown on a map below) in Point Breeze, the same neighborhood where the city just a few months ago moved to seize other lots for affordable housing development, to the chagrin of some market-rate developers.
View PRA Lots for Sale in a full screen map
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