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Archive: February, 2012
This Wednesday, Pennsylvania's Legislative Reapportionment Commission will meet in an effort to sort out what has become the state's messiest redistricting battle to date. Former Philly City Councilman Angel Ortiz, along with bus-loads of Latino voters from Philly, Allentown and Reading, will be there — in an effort to forestall what they call the potential disenfranchisement of 700,000 Latino Pennsylvanians.
Primaries in Pennsylvania, for races including the Republican Presidential nomination and seats in the state's General Assembly, are set for April 24. So when the state Supreme Court threw out proposed new legislative districts (designed to accommodate population changes documented in the 2010 Census, including 46 percent growth in the Latino community), the court suggested going back to 2001 voting districts for expediency's sake. Ortiz, who pushed hard for more Latino-friendly districts, says that's just not fair. The new redistricting maps, says Ortiz, could have carved out four or more seats for Latino representatives, including two in Philly, one in Reading and one in Allentown. "Because some interests in this state want to maintain their political bases, 700,000 Latino residents will not have representation," he argues.
Ortiz wants to delay the primary to allow time for the drawing if new maps. If it means having multiple primaries — as is happening in New York — so be it: "The voting rights of people take precedence." However, Mayor Nutter and others are pushing to set special elections soon for six currently empty seats, further adding pressure to keep 2001 lines (and, thereby, the April 24 date) in place.
Illegal immigrants are flooding your doorsteps with mail!
Today's Stu Bykofsky column in the Daily News is not only mean-spirited but contains a number of glaring factual errors. The entirely speculative premise of his column is that a guy in South Philly gets a lot of mail at his house addressed to other people who have Hispanic surnames. While this may seem like a small annoyance best resolved via the recycling bin, Bykofsky boldly conveys the suggestion that the government might place a lien on this guy's house because undocumented immigrants are tax dodgers not paying their fair share for the public benefits they greedily consume.
“He's frustrated and afraid that he may somehow get entangled in this, worried that he may open the mail to find a lien against his property.”
“As The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com have gone up for sale once again, we watched with dismay as our own coverage of the process was compromised and censored,” according to a newsroom petition that began circulating last night. “Our employers promise this won’t happen again. That must be the case."
The last two weeks have been a harrowing ride for Inquirer and Daily News reporters — and a half-blind one for readers.
Philadelphia Media Network (PMN) is in negotiations with a group led by former mayor and governor Ed Rendell, South Jersey Democratic Party boss George Norcross and Flyers owner Ed Snider. The prospect of such powerful owners has reporters worried about editorial independence — especially after top management censored a Feb. 7 blog post by the Daily News' David Gambacorta reporting that mega-developer Bart Blatstein had formed a rival group intending to bid on PMN.
On January 14, the state liquor store at 40th and Market was abruptly shut down thanks to safety concerns about the apparently decrepit building. As a result, displaced customers have flooded into the store at 4906 Baltimore Avenue, prompting crazy long waits at a two-cash-register store that already (anecdotally appeared to) have some of the longest lines of any liquor store in the city.
“We are in the process of securing a new location,” says Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB) Director of External Affairs Stacey Witalec, a process she says will take between six and eight months.
In the meantime, however, the state agency that runs Pennsylvania wine and liquor stores has no plans to do anything at all to ameliorate the situation at 49th and Baltimore Avenue. And the situation is truly dire―or at least dire as booze-related situations get.
On Friday, January 27 employees turned away this reporter's mother, visiting from out of town, saying that she would have to wait outside because the store was so packed. Unfavorable comparisons to the Soviet Union were later made.
The legislature is moving to pass the orwellianly titled "Women's Right to Know Act," which would, as my editor Samantha Melamed notes, “require ultrasounds before abortions and then give women 'the right' to look at them.”
Doctors would also be required to invite women to listen to the fetal heartbeat.
“Ultrasounds,” says bill sponsor State Rep. Kathy Rapp, “dispel the myth that abortion is only about removing a ‘clump of cells’ and that information in itself is absolutely critical to every mother’s ability to make a fully informed decision.”
A weekly series of foulmouthed investigations into empty lots, dead-ass proposals and other development and design phenomena in Philadelphia. Find more stories like this at philaphilia.blogspot.com.
Bridgeman's View Tower, 900 N. Delaware Ave.: Dead from every angle.
Here it is ... another broken dream, and a good-looking one at that. This awesome tower was set to be the impetus for a second downtown along the Northern Liberties Delaware Riverfront. Instead, we got dicked.
This Crystal Tower of Crotch-kicks was first proposed in 2006 by developers Marc F. Stein and Ryan Roberts under the name 2945 LLC. Even the NIMBYs in the Northern Liberties Neighborhood Association thought it was cool. Zoning for the parcel was changed in late 2006 and it got whole-heartedly approved in January of 2007.
Are those palm trees?
Excitement filled the air in the Philadelphia forum/blogosphere as people went nuts over this thing.... it was seen as an unstoppable development that could give rise to many more. At the time, the Northern Liberties Delaware Riverfront was swimming in a shitload of tall building proposals.
View galleryResidents in East Kensington have been eyeing the so-called Megalots, a group of intriguingly contiguous vacant lots at York and Emerald streets, for a while now. It seems like the perfect place for a park, a dog park, playing fields, residential development — in short, anything but the blight that's there today. So much so, that one local artist recently went out and installed this hopeful artistic statement, in the hopes that it might help unblight the block.
Unfortunately, Megalots is also an illustration of just how challenging Philly's vacant land issues are. Parts of the lot are already owned by the city or the Philadelphia Housing Development Corp., and parts appear to be more than 10 years in arrears on (albeit microscopic) taxes, making them ripe for tax sale. However, other parts are privately owned and all paid up, and as recently as a few years ago were being advertised as a development opportunity. And getting the already maxed-out Parks and Recreation Department to add new properties to its inventory might be a challenge.
Hopefully, this will be the type of project facilitated in the future by Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez' newly proposed Land Bank, which "will be coordinated with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority and other City agencies directly engaged with vacant property management and blight elimination.” In the meantime, we hope neighborhood guerrilla artists will keep on doing their best.
Charles Murray, a leading right-wing polemicist, has spent three decades beating up on poor black people. His new book, however, is an act of more equal opportunity opprobrium, arguing that white working class America is in crisis because it has a fucked up and backward culture. And his main example is Philadelphia's Fishtown.
Murray published summaries of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 in the Wall Street Journal and another in the right-wing New Criterion. His argument is a mean and vicious slander against the people of Fishtown and working class people everywhere, detailing the decline of what he calls the “Founding virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion amongst the rabble. It's based on the Philadelphia neighborhood, but Murray uses “Fishtown” as an exemplar to generalize about white Americans with “no academic degree higher than a high school diploma...[and unemployed or working in] a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.”
Murray complains that Fishtown residents are increasingly less moral than people in Belmont, based on the wealthy white Boston suburb full of “successful people in managerial and professional occupations―the elites who are in positions of influence over the nation’s economy, media, intellectual life, and politics.” Which is where Mitt Romney lives―so I suppose he offers a lesson in hypocrisy, avarice and greed, huh? But beyond Murray's poisonous politics, the biggest problem is that his argument is wrong.
This week was, if nothing else, a fascinating look at how things are working in Harrisburg these days. Tom Corbett may not have passed his pet school vouchers plan last year, but he's definitely setting the agenda when it comes to an equally important issue: treatment of the natural gas industry hungry for more access and less regulation as they look to harvest fuel from the Marcellus Shale.
He said in a statement yesterday: “After long negotiations and a lot of hard work, we have reached a consensus on how to address the impacts in the Marcellus Shale regions. I am very pleased with the cooperative spirit shown by the General Assembly and their staffs while working to resolve this complex issue. I look forward to signing this legislation into law.”
So that's one side of the story. The other: secret, backroom negotiations that led to a deal with almost no input by Democrats or, for that matter, the public. Phllly-based Democrat Rep. Michael O'Brien said in a statement:
If you haven't read this week's CP cover story, by reporter Daniel Denvir, it's time you did. It's all about how our governor, Tom Corbett, is systematically dismantling our social safety nets, defunding our schools and universities and making it even more challenging for Philly's poorest to climb out of poverty. In case you need some inspiration to dive into this apocalyptic, true-life story, check out these concept sketches for the cover, by our mad genius illustrator Evan M. Lopez. For more, visit his website.
An excerpt from the cover story follows:
Under Attack
Dispatches from Tom Corbett's war on Philly.
Anthony Lomax, a 63-year-old North Philadelphian, has no teeth thanks to the state of Pennsylvania.
A survivor of prostate, kidney and rectal cancer, Lomax was diagnosed with gum disease and underwent dental surgery in the fall. He needed only partial dentures, he says, but he was informed the state would cover only complete sets. So, in preparation, he had all his teeth removed.
Last week, Lomax's dentist called with bad news: "Welfare says they can't pay for that."
That's because, among new Medicaid rules implemented by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, was one that Lomax, who had gotten dentures before, had never heard of: a limit of one pair of dentures per lifetime, per beneficiary. Lomax, retired from working in the copy room at a Center City architectural firm, can only hope his new dentures will be covered on appeal. In the meantime, eating is a challenge.
Lomax is far from alone. City Paper has learned that cuts implemented under Corbett have had a far deeper impact on almost every service the state provides to Philadelphians — including education; health care for the poor and disabled; welfare; food stamps; and support services for victims of domestic violence, the disabled and the homeless — than has previously been reported. It's all part of the ideologically driven agenda Corbett outlined in his campaign, and he has delivered: slashing expenditures with little apparent regard for the plight of the poor, or for Philadelphia's threadbare safety nets and crumbling school system.
More pain is on the way. On Tuesday, Corbett proposed a new budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1, 2012: a 30 percent cut to publicly supported universities like Temple, a 20 percent cut to a set of safety-net programs — and no new taxes. The City of Philadelphia will receive an estimated $42 million in cuts to public welfare programs, many of which are being consolidated into a new and perplexing block-grant program.
"The cuts the governor has proposed for the Department of Public Welfare (DPW) are extreme, targeted and painful," says Donald Schwarz, Philadelphia's Deputy Mayor for Health and Opportunity. "Philadelphia will do all it can to blunt these effects, but given the city's fiscal situation and the magnitude of the estimated cuts ... there's not much we can do." Read on here.
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