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A picket line of young men clad in basketball shorts and over-sized International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 t-shirts spanned the sidewalk outside the Famous 4th Street Deli in Queen Village, the unofficial election day clubhouse of Philadelphia's political class. In place of rat-centric protest signs they held eight foot strips of plywood covered stem to stern with union leader John Dougherty's favored slate of politicians for today's primary. One name loomed large: Alan Butkovitz for City Controller.
Butkovitz's name was on the breaths of the assembled pols and their attendants packed into the tiled interior of the diner, once owned by former Zoning Board of Adjustments head and local Democratic party insider David Auspitz. The incumbent and party favorite for the Office of City Controller, the most hotly contested seat in a mid-term election year full of judicial candidates and little else, Butkovitz was greeted by a standing ovation from a crowd that included Councilmembers Jannie Blackwell (wearing a "Butkovitz for Controller" t-shirt) and Jim Kenney, former District Attorney Lynn Abraham and her successor Seth Williams, and two-time mayoral candidate Tom Knox.
It was a relatively impressive display of might for a political machine that is widely viewed as aging (the waitresses and this reporter were one of perhaps half a dozen folks under the age of 40) and verging on obsolescence. But when quizzed on the day's primary so far, several pols revealed a palpable nervousness about Butkovitz's odds against his challenger Brett Mandel (who caught flak today for allegedly campaigning in voting areas).
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.
109 Spruce Street: Old conjectural drawing of Tun Tavern superimposed (badly) onto the site of the proposed project.
In last week's Empty Lot of the Week, I examined a dirty pile of empty land at the corner of Spruce Street and 38th Parallel Place, between Front and Second. At the end, I appealed to the sky for an answer as to why the city has been sitting on this space for the last 40 years without nary a sign of life, besides a brand new sidewalk that was just installed -- the first one this lot has ever had! In the comments section of that piece, Philaphile Bob Bruhin brought up the fact that a re-build of the legendary Tun Tavern was once set to happen here but never did. A Dead-Ass Proposal! This Dead-Ass Proposal is one of the worst kinds -- one that gets proposed over and over again but just can't get built. In fact, its hard to even declare this one fully dead since there are people out there intent on building this motherfucker!
Tun Tavern, built in 1693, existed for 88 years at the corner of Tun Alley and King Street (later Water Street), now a site several meters above the slow lane on I-95. This tavern was one of the many to claim to be the first of its kind in the city and/or America. Tun Tavern also carries the legendary significance of being the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps and the first Masonic Lodge in America. Though it is certain that Tun Tavern was the first Masonic Lodge, the Marine Corps Birthplace legend has never been historically confirmed. Nonetheless, any Marine would tell you that Tun Tavern in Philadelphia is where the Marines come from. Oh, I should probably mention that Tun Tavern is also legendary for being the birthplace of the first Philly Cheesesteak while the place was called Peggy Mullen's Red Hot Beefsteak House.
Here's the description posted with this video:
Five members of The Panic Hour were followed into the City Hall rail station in Center City Philadelphia. Kyle Prouty was illegally searched and detained by SEPTA police officer Nicole Lawson at 3:20pm on 5/20/13. Kyle was charged with "disorderly conduct" "obstructing a highway and other public passage" and "resisting arrest". The people in this video had just left an arraignment hearing for Adam Kokesh and Nikki Allen Poe who were kidnapped from a peaceful marijuana rally on 5/18/13. They are currently being held illegally in Federal Detention at the Federal Detention Center 700 arch street Philadelphia Pennsylvania.
I suppose it's not a huge surprise that people who call themselves The Panic Hour were at the center of a commotion like this. And, obviously, since the video picks up with the transit cop already confronting the skateboard dude, we don't have the whole story. Liveleak actually has two videos of the incident, both from up close.
There is only one attorney running for the three open seats in the city’s scandal-plagued Traffic Court in today’s primary election. The other 26 candidates (24 Democrats and two Republicans) are variously unqualified for the position and reluctant to share any information about their backgrounds. A little digging gives some hints as to why.
Take for example Sharif Ali. On his campaign website and Twitter — which incidentally boasted some 50,000 followers at one point in the campaign cycle, nearly all of them fake or inactive — Ali states, “I am a life long Philadelphia resident. I have had the honor and privilege to serve President Obama.” But he fails to explain in what capacity he served the president or to elaborate on anything else he’s done in life. What Ali knows — and the rest of should be appalled by — is that the only prerequisite for running for Traffic Court is to have lived in the district in which you’re running for at least one year prior to the November general election, and to have filled out the required paperwork, including a petition, to get on today’s ballot as a candidate for judge.
Have you been home yet today? If you're like me, you had this flier waiting in your doorway. The only problem with it — besides some daring grammatical choices — is that it doesn't make much sense. Produced by Philadelphia Phuture, the same union-linked group that participated in the attempt to torpedo Councilman At-Large David Oh's campaign in 2011 (by way of claims that City Paper debunked), it claims that "only ONE candidate for City Controller can stop the reckless AVI plan." That is, incumbent Alan Butkovitz.
So, here are the problems. For one thing, as Councilman Bill Green loves to remind us, AVI is already happening: City Council essentially authorized it last year to begin in 2014. How, Philadelphia Phuture PAC, do you anticipate Alan Butkovitz will reverse that course, without legislative or veto power? For another, if Butkovitz does have the power to "stop it from happening," he better act fast. The budget season winds down over the next two weeks. For yet another, why hasn't Butkovitz made the promise to stop the city from "force AVI down our throats" before? He has complained bitterly about the tax assessment program, but has not outlined how he personally might be able to intervene.
Last month, City Paper noted that City Controller Alan Butkovitz had an awfully interesting idea of what constitutes the type of brochure that city dollars should be paying for. The glossy tri-fold number he had been handing out at community meetings did, after all, seem more about promoting Butkovitz himself than about soliciting reports of fraud. Subsequently, a source told CP that he had seen Team Butkovitz pass out the very same brochure at a Liberty City candidates' night, and provided documentation that Philly Ethics Board investigator Michael Cooke had asked him to come into the office to discuss it.
So, does that mean Butkovitz is, as challenger Brett Mandel alleged at a debate, "under investigation by the Ethics Board"? Well, that's an easy claim to make given that the Ethics Board won't comment on ongoing investigations. But — even with the email documentation in hand — the question remains: Is it an accurate one?
As regards the brochure in question being distributed at the event in question, CP could not find anyone willing to go on the record with that claim. Transgender rights activist Jordan Gwendolyn Davis, who was at the event, said that the brochure was "NOT" given out there. And James Duggan, editor of QueerTimes.net (and no Butkovitz fan, it seems), seconded that. In fact, he was kind enough to scan the brochure he says was given out. Here it is, below. They look fairly similar — only, this one is marked as being paid for by the Butkovitz campaign.
Butkovitz' own campaign manager, Maurice Floyd, of course denies that the city-funded brochures were given out at a political event.
Shane Creamer, who heads Philly's Ethics Board, says that "there are preliminary inquiries and then there are investigations."
So the communication from Cooke, which the source provided to City Paper, may only have indicated that there was a complaint triggering a preliminary inquiry, not that Butkovitz was under formal investigation.
Creamer says that if a preliminary inquiry determines there's no cause for investigation, that fact would never be disclosed to the public or any party involved. If the Ethics Board does launch a formal investigation, only then do they have to notify both the complainant and the subject of the investigation of the results, one way or the other.
Brochure-gate or not, there may be other questions for Team Butkovitz. Among them: Is it likely or possible that Floyd, who sublets his office from Ceisler Communications — which holds a contract with the Controller's office — does not get any assistance from Ceisler on the campaign or use any of Ceisler's (aka city-subsidized) resources or equipment for campaign work? There is no other Butkovitz campaign office, and no campaign phone number except for individual campaign consultants' cell numbers.
Floyd says there's no such crossover. "I do some consulting work for [Ceisler], on and off, as I do for other folks. Larry [Ceisler] does not work on this campaign, if that's what you're trying to insinuate."
If you're not a union member or considered a "super voter" — one of those few coveted voters considered reliable enough to merit lots and lots of campaign mailers — you may not have noticed, but there's an election tomorrow. You'll be asked to vote in the primary race for Common Pleas Court judges, Municipal Court judges, Traffic Court judges and — most high profile — City Controller. Note: You do not need a photo ID to vote in this election, though poll workers are supposed to ask to see it.
The race for the Democratic Controller nomination, between incumbent Alan Butkovitz and challengers Brett Mandel and Mark Zecca, may come down to a show of union clout; IBEW Local 98 alone is spending $1 million this primary cycle.
If you're puzzling through the judicial options, fight the urge to just vote for whoever is first on the ballot. The Philadelphia Bar Association offers a reference guide to who to support for Common Pleas and Municipal Court, though without much in the way of explanation. As for Traffic Court, your vote may not matter much anyway, since the whole thing could soon be dissolved by the General Assembly (or dragged back to hell when then devil returns to claim what’s his). The Bar Association does not attempt to puzzle through those candidates, who have been the subjects of some admirable takedowns in your Philadelphia dailies, noting criminal records and an utter misunderstanding of what a Traffic Court judge does.
Despite the bad press and the potential elimination of the office for which he's running, top-ballot-position-holder Warren Bloom (catchphrases: "Bloom in the spring!" and "I'm from the hood, I'll do you good") is confident. "I think people should for all intents and purposes be judged on their merit," he says. When asked if he thought that possibly coasting into office based on randomly drawn ballot position was a merit-based way to win office, he said it could be. "I think fate sometimes turns the hand toward those that have put in the work. And I believe that me being first place — and Lewis Harris is my good friend and actually Lewis Harris ran for Traffic Court before I did; he's in second place. We believe this is simply the kind hand of fate that brought us this advantage."
Bloom continues to campaign on leniency and a pledge to seek a change to the statute of limitations on parking tickets — which in fact are not handled by Traffic Court judges but rather by the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication and, on appeal, Common Pleas Court.
Hot on the tail of one of the city's biggest slumlords being sentenced to serious (or perhaps not serious enough) jail time, a reader has come forward with the scoop on another infamously delinquent property owner.
Ted Snyder, who was profiled as part of last month's cover on blight in Old City, rented one of his commercial properties to a reader, who referred to himself as "a beneficiary of Ted's strange concept of being a real estate mogul." Their lease agreement, which the reader realized later had never actually been signed by Snyder, lasted for "over 20 years."
The reader's recollections shed some light onto a figure who was, above all else, extremely private in his affairs. They also reveal a man, as hinted at by other accounts in our story, who was crippled by paranoia and eccentricities.
When our reader first encountered Snyder, an erstwhile arcade manager in the 1980s, "he was wearing a change belt with brass coin dispensers."
View galleryIn protest of major school budget cuts, thousands of students walked out of class at noon on Friday. As teachers and parents testified before City Council on a proposal to increase the Use & Occupancy tax to help close the school district's $300 million deficit, students took the streets (hashtag: #walkout215), marching from the Philadelphia School District headquarters on North Broad Street down to City Hall and back again. Some students joined in a booming chant — "SOS, save our schools" — while others toted handmade signs, snapped photographs and pecked on their phones. Many brandished "Join the Movement" stickers provided by Youth United for Change, a student-led organization.
"We want our sports. We want our music. We want the stuff that keeps us in school," said Zara, an 11th-grade student at Julia R. Masterman School (she declined to provide her last name). As someone who lost a considerable amount of weight while playing on her school's soccer team, she is particularly concerned about the effect sports team cuts would have on youth obesity rates.
For another high-schooler, Emmanuel Rodriguez (10th grade, George Washington Carver High School), college admission is a more pressing concern. Without counselors to help students through the application process or extracurriculars that could lead to scholarships, he wonders, "How are we going to get into college?"
As the chants subsided and students grew weary (one girl muttered, "I don't want to be here anymore"), adult members of Youth United for Change directed the procession back up Broad.
Still energized after two hours of protesting, Julie Sherchuk, an eighth-grader about to enter high school at J. R. Masterman, was troubled by the prospect of the music program dissolving. An active member of her school's choir, she worries that there won't be a high school musical in which to participate. "It's not fair for our first year," she said. As her group of friends described it, if all extracurricular activities were discontinued at J. R. Masterman, students would struggle to organize events of their own. Because of security guard cuts, students already cannot stay after school. They must either hold their clubs during lunchtime or meet early in the morning, a challenge for Scherchuk who lives 45 minutes away from school.
For those who wonder if the protest was just an excuse for students to skip out of class early on a sunny Friday, Bella Sa-Lasbetsch made it clear that this could not be said of everyone. "We need to be here to have our voice heard."
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The national media has packed up its encampment at the Criminal Justice Center. Philadelphia will, once again, somehow make do without its fickle attention.
Out of-town reporters, of course, made this rare visit to America's fifth largest but most ignored big city after conservatives accused the mainstream media of failing to cover Dr. Kermit Gosnell's rogue abortion clinic on Lancaster Avenue.
The liberal media, conservatives alleged, were concealing Gosnell's horrors from the public because they reflected poorly on abortion. This was perhaps surprising to local reporters who had covered every step of the case from the grand jury indictment on. It was likely also a surprise to abortion rights supporters, like Drexel professor Rose Corrigan who told me in 2011 that "because of the Medicaid ban on abortion funding and state restrictions, poor women in the state and in Philadelphia really face horrific choices about what to do if they have an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy."
Abortion rights activists were from beginning eager to talk about the reproductive healthcare services denied to low-income women. The national press, however, was only interested in covering the trial once the right had successfully turned the entire episode into an extended version of those blow-up pictures of disfigured fetuses they carry around at protests.
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