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Archive: January, 2012
Next week, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation will come to Philly to host one of three national hearings on President Obama's proposed clean car standards. According to Rep. Bob Brady, "This is the single largest step our country has ever taken to deal with global warming, while reducing our addiction to oil."
[+3] While on a fishing trip on the Amazon, Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay rescues a man who was attacked by an anaconda. Then Brad Lidge shows up and throws the guy right down the snake’s throat.
[+1] Wawa announces plans to open locations in Florida. So far the No. 1 complaint from the test locations? “I tried to order a Sizzli with extra bacon, but I ended up voting for Pat Buchanan."
[-4] A new plan would make Pennsylvania residents under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings ineligible for food stamps. It was proposed by Rep. Snidely F. Whiplash of Diealready County after his “Drop ’Em on an Ice Floe” idea was trounced on the floor.
[-1] Two thieves steal 500 pounds of frozen meatballs from a delivery truck in Old City. And return them to safely their homes in South Jersey.
[+2] The Philadelphia Housing Authority ditches its plan to construct new houses atop a former 18th-century burial ground in Germantown, which is currently the site of an apartment complex slated for demolition. “This housing authority,” says a spokesman, “is clean.”
[-1] US Airways and other airlines say the proposed expansion at Philadelphia International will lead to increased costs. And a bigger airport.
[+2] In an app-making contest, a team of Philadelphia programmers wins “Best Social Services” prize for Sheltr, which tells users where nearby homeless shelters are. “Thanks a lot, nerds. A lot of good it does me, since I’m still using this crappy 3G first-gen Droid. Because, you know, I’m frickin homeless.”
[-1] A 4-pound, $2 million ruby sculpted to look like the Liberty Bell is stolen from a Wilmington jewelry store. National Treasure 3 is going to suck.
[-1] Men’s Health and Women’s Health magazines put out their annual lists of the 100 best U.S. cities, and rate Philadelphia at the bottom — numbers 98 and 97, respectively. “Well, I rather like it,” says genderless carcinogenic cloud.
This week’s total: 0 | Last week’s total: 9
At the final session of City Council in December, then-presumed (now-official) Council President Darrell Clarke wasted no time in setting the agenda for the year to come. He introduced two bills — one, a plan to provide for the leasing of ad space on municipal properties like City Hall, and the other, perhaps even more important, a proposal to create "Development Districts," where blighted property can be sold off at as much as 90 percent below market rates (and which the Committee of Seventy has already singled out as a potential field day for Councilmanic prerogative).
The bills are actually part of a seven-point plan (though there maybe as many as 10 elements total among the proposals) to raise revenue and reduce costs citywide, resulting in a purported $40 million to $50 million benefit to Philly's bottom line. Clarke, along with a "senior corps of City Council members," can be expected to pursue all seven proposals in the near future, according to his legislative aide, William Carter. The other points of the plan are: leasing on-street spots in non-metered locations to car shares via a bidding process; the creation of a coordinated street furniture program run by a private operator (worth $2 million annually); an expanded franchise and concession program that could include vendors and the hosting of telecommunications infrastructure ($15 million annually); municipal asset sales (worth $100 million total); and retrofitting municipal buildings for energy savings (worth $2 million annually).
Municipal asset sales, according to the plan, would be pursued in an "aggressive and systematic" manner, (partly due to Philly's burden of pension debt). The $100 million figure, or $5 million per year, counts the long-term lease or sale of technology, vehicles, "major parks, roads, bridges and buildings." (The city's 2012 fiscal year operating budget projects only $2.5 million in asset sales.) Concessions — including food and souvenir vendors, activity or equipment rental providers in public plazas and parks, such as Fairmount Park — could be driven by "increasing seating at concession stands, expanding the types allowed and incentivizing more profitable concessions."
City Controller Alan Butkovitz today slammed Governor Tom Corbett's attack on food stamp recipients, joining other city leaders in warning that the new 'asset test' will harm low-income Philadelphians. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.
“This decision is not only ‘mean-spirited’ but counter-productive in helping those on the lower economic rungs gain eventual long-term financial self-sufficiency,” Butkovitz wrote in a letter to Public Welfare Secretary Gary Alexander and Governor Corbett. “In a time when many are still struggling to recover from the near-collapse of our economy, both of these groups are especially vulnerable and in need of financial help to feed their families while trying to secure their future financial survival.”
The food stamp program feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia.
Butkovitz criticized Corbett for playing politics with hungry people's lives, saying the campaign for “eliminating food stamps for the poor and working is really a red herring aimed at masking an ideological agenda.”
As I noted yesterday, eliminating “waste, fraud and abuse” is an old and recurrent refrain from those who seek to dismantle the country's social welfare system. But it's a cynical ruse with almost no basis in reality: 30 percent of those eligible for food stamps in Pennsylvania don't receive them. According to federal data, the Inquirer notes, Pennsylvania has a fraud rate of just one-tenth of 1 percent.
In the face of widespread and growing need alongside dwindling resources, the conservative answer is to change the subject and blame the poor.
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The master plan for the Delaware River waterfront calls for a series of high-design connector streets to ease the bleakness of the I-95/Delaware Avenue crossing: think Race Street, where artwork and signage points travelers to the recently beautified Race Street Pier. Because the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is already ripping up I-95 around Fishtown in order to widen it, Columbia Avenue in Fishtown will be among the first connector streets to get the redesign treatment.
Studio Bryan Hanes — the landscape architecture and urban design firm behind the spectacular and ambitious (and yet-to-be-realized) plan for Penn Treaty Park — showed off a proposal this week for the Columbia Avenue Connector. The three-phase design that stretches from Girard Avenue to Delaware Avenue, featuring public art, a dog park, additional parking, and a "wampum-belt"-inspired design that would be embedded into the pavement of the street, a visual reference to the history of the adjacent Penn Treaty Park. The plan also called for trees — lots of them, including some that would be planted within parking lanes, where narrow sidewalks and the tangle of overhead wires couldn't otherwise accommodate them. That last part of of the proposal drew pretty intense skepticism from neighbors, who worried both about the upkeep of the trees and, especially, the elimination of a handful of parking spaces to make way for them. "People who have lived in the neighborhood a long time, it's like a nightmare. That tree-fear comes in," says Karen Rouse, a 21-year resident of Fishtown. Neighbors suggested tree-alternatives, including hanging baskets, living walls and mere images of trees to replace the actual plants.
Amtrak Police arrested three Occupy Philly protesters at 30th Street Station this afternoon who were handing out leaflets in opposition to a new Pennsylvania anti-abortion law.
“It was just people handing out flyers,” says organizer Amanda Geraci. “There was no blocking people getting to their trains, there was no civil disobedience. It was just handing out paper.”
Amtrak Police approached the protesters at 12:15pm, according to Occupy, two to three minutes after they began a “mic check.” Amtrak Police allegedly gave no order to disperse before making arrests.
“We walked into 30th Street Station in a group and we started to mic check in reference Senate Bill 732, which is an anti-abortion bill,” says Aine, an arrested protester. “The Amtrak Police just pinned us in in a circle and didn’t tell me anything. I turned around to walk away, and one of the cops grabbed me by the arm and told me I was under arrest.”
The three activists, amongst twenty leafleting at 30th Street Station, were detained for 45 minutes and released with citations charging them with obstructing a highway, defiant trespassing and disorderly conduct. Amtrak Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment from City Paper.
The two other arrested protesters say that police assaulted them.
“The cop grabbed me and slammed me on my shoulder blade and stomped on my shoulder blade and elbow,” John Phillips. “The officer was like, ‘I told you you didn’t want to get arrested.’”
“In the middle of the mic check,” says Lex, “they grabbed me put cuffs on my wrists, and shoved a baton into my back.”
Occupy Philly isn’t backing down. They will be handing out more flyers against Senate Bill 732 today at 4:30pm. Republican Governor Tom Corbett signed the legislation, which would require abortion clinics to make extremely costly renovations to stay in business, in December.
A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Phladelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Bounded by North 12th, Race, North Marvine, North Sartain and Vine Streets.
You know an empty lot sucks when it's near a bunch of other empty lots and you still hate it as much as if it was between supertall skyscrapers. This crappy little L-shaped lot with two shitbird buildings on it has no damn excuse to exist. In that weird spot behind the Convention Center, this one creates a glaring hole where development should reign, but doesn't. The northern end is probably a lost cause since it's right across the street from the Convention Center maintenance ramp, but the southern end is a goddamn tragedy. This spot was once pretty cool and could be again.
I hate when surface parking lots completely envelop old interstitial streets. This one absorbed more than any other. Interstitial streets are those little alley-sized city streets found between the numbered streets and the major named streets. The majority of them are dead ends with small trinity-style rowhouses. This Ocean of Asphalt Assholes didn't just replace one or two... it replaced a whole fucking network of them.
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has announced a major assault on the food stamp program that feeds 1.8 million Pennsylvanians, including 439,245 in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare announced that on May 1, people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets will be barred from receiving food stamps. People over 60 would have a $3,250 cap.
As the Inquirer points out in a detailed look, the move to cut food stamps is way out of line with what other states are doing: “Pennsylvania plans to make the amount of food stamps that people receive contingent on the assets they possess — an unexpected move that bucks national trends and places the commonwealth among a minority of states.”
The trend during the Great Recession, with millions falling into poverty, has been to remove such barriers to assistance. Gov. Ed Rendell eliminated the state's asset test in 2008. Pennsylvania now joins 11 states with asset tests — including Indiana, Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota.
In case you missed it over the weekend —and since the chance that Rick Santorum will be completely irrelevant by Wednesday appears to be growing by the day — it seems as good a time as any to call attention to how brilliantly his ultra-conservative rhetoric works to caption cartoons from the New Yorker. Check out the rest of them here.
“I remember that Tuesday night in 2006 and how down I was because he got beat so badly,” a Republican committeewoman told The Scranton Times Tribune. “However, had he been successful that night, would you and I be having this conversation?"
Republican Party of Pennsylvania Chairman Rob Gleason said it was “wonderful to see a Pennsylvania Republican in the national spotlight.”
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