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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 |
Today, at Broad and Walnut, reproductive-rights advocates will be rallying for a noontime "visibility event," one of many being held throughout the state. As noted in the current issue of City Paper, the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, doesn't bring much cause for celebration — or, as Time Magazine put it, abortion-rights activists have "been losing ever since."
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The AIDS advocacy group ACT UP Philadelphia disrupted a Liberty Bell speech by Gov. Tom Corbett today, according to activists. (It doesn't appear as though Corbett's visit was much publicized in advance. He is usually greeted by protesters whenever he visits the city.) The group is demanding that Corbett restore General Assistance cash welfare to the state's poor and disabled. In November, Project HOME told City Paper that they had seen an influx of people requiring shelter, food and services since Corbett and legislative Republicans cut the $205 per month benefit.
In March, CP profiled the city's recovery houses for recovering drug addicts, which heavily depended on General Assistance checks.
(UPDATE: The Penn Alexander line is no more, probably preventing a few cases of hypothermia along the way.)
Don't blame Robert Tucker; blame the system. Last year, the line for registration at Penn Alexander involved a nearly 24-hour wait outside West Philly's most sought-after neighborhood elementary school. Rumor was, this year, the line for Tuesday registration would be starting the Friday before. So, this morning, Tucker enlisted his mom (his wife is 37 weeks pregnant) to bring a chair out and start things off, hopefully ensuring a kindergarten slot for his daughter. By 2 p.m., nearly 70 parents (after a tense period of detente) had joined him.
Remember how thousands of Philadelphians had to cast provisional ballots on Election Day and no one could figure out why? The Pennsylvania Department of State has chimed in with its own analysis, based on a sample of 5,203 provisional ballot names sent over by the City Commissioners, who run Philly elections. It found that just 3 percent of those forced to vote provisionally should have been; the rest ought to have been able to vote on a machine.
They found that 5,125 of the names were in voter records. Of those, 157 were in regular poll books and 4,327 were in supplemental poll books, which the city generated; all of those people should have been able to vote using machines, not on provisional ballots. Another 564 voters should have been in the poll books but weren't, mostly because they were underage and the city apparently didn't use a necessary program to change them to active status. (Although the state does concede that there was one poor soul of the last name "Null" who apparently was excluded from the database for coding reasons.)
The memo from Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele concludes: "If Philadelphia had implemented the underage utility in our system, had the correct supplemental provisional ballot date range and the poll workers used both the regular poll books and supplemental poll books correctly, out of the 5,203 provisional ballot names we checked, they would have only had 155 provisional ballots cast. We stand ready to work with the City Commissioners to help them prevent similar issues from occurring in future elections."
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