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Archive: July, 2012
Less than a year after it was defeated by residents, the controversial Callowhill Neighborhood Improvement District appears to be rearing its head again.
A week ago, the Callowhill Neighborhood Association announced a “60 Day Pilot Cleaning Program” would be going into effect in areas “where there was strong support for the 2011 Neighborhood Improvement District.” The cleaning is apparently being funded by a grant from outgoing 1st District Councilman Frank DiCicco, who introduced legislation that would have created the NID, and is being administered by the Center City District, whose Executive Director, Paul Levy, first proposed the NID and has been a strong supporter of it.
Word of the pilot program went out ten days ago to members of the Callowhill Neighbors Association listserv, among them vocal NID opponent Lee Quillen. Quillen says that Councilman Mark Squilla, whom she contacted immediately, was initially unaware of the pilot program. He also told her, she says, that he intends to re-introduce the NID legislation. (The Councilman is on vacation and was unavailable for comment and a message left for his legislative aide wasn't immediately returned).
CCD's Levy confirms that his agency is conducting an $80,000 “demonstration program to show what maintenance can do,” which is part of a two-part contract with the city's Commerce Department – which itself recently produced a brochure giving advice for starting Business and Neighborhood Improvement Districts in Philadelphia – that also includes ongoing work by CCD to acquire the SEPTA-owned portion of the Reading Viaduct. The $80,000 for cleaning consists of $60,000 for graffiti and litter removal and $20,000 for as-yet-unspecified street improvements.
It was last April that DiCicco first introduced a bill in City Council that would have created a “Neighborhood Improvement District” in the are between Vine and Callowhill, Broad and 10th Streets, that would have imposed an extra tax on residents, to be used for neighborhood improvements.
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.
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Hey, it was the 40's. Image by the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project. |
Bounded by the Ben Franklin Parkway, Pennsylvania Boulevard (JFK Blvd) and the Schuylkill River -- Before the Philadelphia River City and the Century 21 Complex, there was the Triangle Redevelopment Plan by none other than the most ass-kissed starchitect that ever lived, Philly native Louis Kahn! This is yet another Dead-Ass Proposal for the area north of Market near the Schuylkill -- that place must be cursed or something.
Among all the proposals for this neighborhood, this one had the highest possibility of happening. Post-WWII Center City Philadelphia was a big lump of clay that could have been molded into any possible configuration. Most of the city's residential population was on the move toward the Airlite-style rowhouses being built in the "Great" Northeast; Center City's Victorian-era buildings and infrastructure were dirty, outdated and falling apart. There was no such thing as NIMBYs and no one cared about historic preservation.
Fighting a parking ticket in Philly isn't easy — but one local man took the fight all the way to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and won. On July 11, Judge Leon Tucker ruled that the city's Bureau of Administrative Adjudication (BAA), where the ticketed must go to contest violations from the Philadelphia Parking Authority (PPA), must allow citizens the opportunity to cross-examine the officers who wrote their tickets. Tucker also ordered the BAA to require that tickets include the exact location of a car in violation, not just the city block, and ordered that ticket writers sign each ticket they issue.
Since many tickets are currently issued without exact addresses, and are generally not signed, the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication would theoretically not be allowed to sustain some tickets currently under appeal. Meaning, if you're currently in the process of appealing a parking ticket, you could be in luck. However, Jerry Connor, director of the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, says the city is still figuring out what the consequences of the ruling will actually be. "The city's finest legal minds are locking at the opinion … and we will be addressing the conclusion of that review. We don't know what it's going to mean yet," he says.
It all started with the appellant in the case, Jim Pavlock, a Fairmount resident who had a couple of parking tickets and decided to fight them in court after losing his appeals with the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication. He had requested the opportunity to cross-examine the PPA officer who wrote the tickets, but was told that the BAA "never" brings in ticketing officers for hearings. Furthermore, one of the tickets cited him for parking in a crosswalk, though he says he was parked mid-block. Because the PPA Enforcement Officers' Handbook doesn't require specific addresses but only says to "use the block number as the location of the vehicle," it leaves room for error, he argued. And, he insisted, the tickets he received should have been signed by the officer in question.
The failure to sign a ticket violates the Philadelphia Code. The Code also requires a ticket to contain the "location of the violation alleged."
Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to support the Affordable Care Act's controversial individual mandate to buy health insurance. But the justices also delivered conservative governors more wiggle room to opt out of the law's enormous expansion of healthcare for the poor, declaring it unconstitutional for the federal government to require states to participate in an expanded version of Medicaid as a condition of participating in the entire program.
Some conservative Republicans are vowing to reject that part of the law: Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Texas Gov. Rick Perry quickly announced that their states would not participate. Yet there's a possibility that Republican Gov. Tom Corbett may quietly acquiesce. He's still deciding whether to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which is set to provide health insurance to a huge chunk of currently ineligible poor people ― estimated at up to 682,880 Pennsylvanians―living under 133 percent of the federal poverty line.
“There is no decision on that, and we are still reviewing the law,” says Department of Public Welfare spokesperson Donna Morgan.
Conservative governors say their states cannot afford the increased cost to the state-federal program, which in Pennsylvania could be a hike of between 1.4 percent and 2.7 percent in state Medicaid spending. The federal government, however, will pick up most of the tab, starting at 100 percent in the first three years of implementation, through 2017, and gradually declining to 90 percent by 2020.
Paul Davies, former Inquirer deputy editorial page editor and current Philadelphia Magazine blogger, doesn't know what he's talking about. Or at least if he does, he's not letting on.
You see, Davies doesn't like my cover story on Jeremy Nowak's leadership of the William Penn Foundation. The story detailed a well-funded effort to bolster pro-charter-school organizations and defund education advocacy groups that have traditionally been critical of privatization. But instead of writing a thoughtful rebuttal with any sort of factual detail, Davies just lazily insults my reporting:
“City Paper,” Davies wrote, “wrote a breathless story last week that essentially inferred there was some secret right-wing conspiracy to overthrow public education and turn it into a bunch of privately run charter schools. Never mind, the story was lacking in details to support the thesis, and few critics would speak on the record."
Davies' column exemplifies a common establishment response to William Penn: A "breathless" gratitude to a moneyed foundation for bothering to care that Philadelphia exists — so infatuated as to lose sight of all critical consideration.
This week saw the Nutter administration defend the mayor's ban on outdoor meals in city parks in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of religious groups who claim that the ban violates their constitutional freedoms of speech and religious practice.
But hearings before Judge William Yohn focused, so far, less on the constitutionality of the rule than on its practical justification and application thus far, with Judge Yohn asking questions not about constitutional law but about how and whether the mayor's rule stands up to its own purported logic.
Nutter, for example, claimed that the rule sought to provide more "dignity" for those receiving meals; but Judge Yohn on Thursday questioned whether there was more "dignity" in waiting in line for food on City Hall's concrete apron than on the verdant parkway. The administration has claimed that moving people off the Parkway will allow it to better provide services for the homeless; but Yohn noted questioning by plaintiff's attorney Paul Messing that revealed that the city hadn't developed any plan to provide those services before the ban or in the months since.
But most interesting, maybe, was Mayor Nutter's defense of his ban as part of his plan to "end homelessness."
Employees of Teamsters Local 628 were unhappy in the first place when the owners of the Inquirer and Daily News sent layoff notices to 32 building-service workers and security guards effective July 1, noting the workers wouldn't be needed once the papers moved form North Broad Street to a new rented space at 810 Market St. But Local 628 president John Laigaie says it was somewhat understandable: The landlord of the new building provided the services as part of the lease, and the union had to live with it. What he has a problem with: When the company decided to hire extra security guards for the safety of its night-shift workers, he says, it didn't rehire any old security staff — instead, it looked to the building manager to hire the extra security, presumably at a lower cost.
Dating all the way to 1676 and hidden under a parking lot just north of Vine Street for the past 24 years, the West Shipyard is being unearthed for just two weeks, in an archaeological dig that will be open to the public July 18, 1-3 p.m.; July 19, 10 a.m.-12 p.m.; and July 20, 1-3 p.m. The Delaware River Waterfront Corp. commissioned the exploratory dig, which will be carried out by John Milner Associates. Naked City spoke with Rebecca Yamin, a historical archaeologist, consultant on the project and author of Digging in the City of Brotherly Love. Yamin will be giving tours of the site and telling the story of James West's shipyard and the early development on the Philadelphia waterfront.
City Paper: What’s the backstory on this site?
Rebecca Yamin: James West seems to have had a shipyard there as early as 1676, and that’s before William Penn. He also seems to have acquired the Pennypot House, an early tavern. We don’t know if we’re going to find the remains of the tavern, but we hope we’re going to find the remains of the West Shipyard. We’re looking for components of wharves and bulkheads that expanded the shore.
CP: What’s the significance of this site?
RY: This is the beginning of the development of Philadelphia. Imagine having the possible remains of a tavern dating to the 1670s and the remains of a boat yard. It’s the beginning of the story of the development of the Philadelphia waterfront, and that’s what’s significant about it. It will be fascinating to see exactly how that boat yard was organized. You can imagine how the work was being done, and imagine a piece of the past that was fundamentally unrecorded in Philadelphia.
CP: What’s the next step?
RY: The site will be covered back up, because if there are interesting remnants to be explored further, then the Delaware River Waterfront Corp. will have to get much more extensive funding to get a much bigger archaeological excavation. It’s kind of exciting when you’re just beginning a project, because you have no idea what’s going to be there.
After two years of declining populations, the Philadelphia Prison System is getting crowded; its current population is 8,692, according to Public Information Officer Shawn Hawes. That's up from an average population of 8,033 last year and 7,930 in 2010, she says. Prisoners' rights advocates worry that it will only climb further, given several policies put in place this year to crack down on illegal weapons and court no-shows. The prisons are currently in the midst of a two-year monitoring period resulting from a lawsuit regarding over-crowding, according to Angus Love of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project. "The population was close to 10,000 when we filed [the suit]. We're very concerned that we're going to have to go back in and deal with this issue again, when we thought it was resolved."
Hawes says that Philadelphia Prison System does, on some nights, keep dozens of inmates in "triple-cell" situations — where an extra inmate stays into a two-person cell by use of a rubber "boat" on the floor. At the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, she says, "Some days there might be two cells [housing three people per cell], some days there might be 60. We do triple-cell when necessary." The Philly Prison System has also reopened part of Holmesburg Prison, where a gym has been renovated into a "dormitory" filled with bunks for about 100 men.
David Rudovsky, an attorney who was involved in the lawsuit, says diversionary programs that have been put in place through the courts and the District Attorney's Office had helped to bring the number of inmates down.
But the creation of a Bench Warrant Court this spring — where those who turn themselves in or are picked up on bench warrants are generally held in contempt and sent to jail — is having a significant effect. Before the special court was created, those who had court dates and didn't show up generally were simply given a new court date. "In last three months, hundreds of people have been sent to prison. The impact appears to be that it's caused a rise of at least 400 inmates just in Philadelphia," Rudovsky says.
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A federal judge today issued a preliminary injunction barring the City of Philadelphia from enforcing a ban on the serving of outdoor meals in city parks — in the process, tearing apart the city's assertions that the ban is part of a larger plan to serve the homeless and that instituting it wouldn't result in an immediate loss of crucial services.
The ban, imposed as an administrative rule by Mayor Michael Nutter, would have effectively put an end (legally, anyway) to a 10-year-old tradition maintained by various groups, most of them religious, of serving meals to the homeless on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway — the locus of recent efforts by the city improve its attractiveness to tourists and the new home of the relocated Barnes Foundation.
The rule, which had been preceded by only a few days by a different rule requiring new health permits to serve food, was billed by the mayor as a move toward greater “dignity” in providing meals for the homeless and hungry indoors — but was unaccompanied by any plan to do so other than the future formation of a task force to study the issue. The mayor also invited “feeders” to serve their meals on the apron of City Hall, adjacent to which a major renovation of City Hall's Dilworth Plaza is underway.
In May, that rule was challenged in a lawsuit by the Philadelphia civil-rights firm Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing & Feinberg, LLP, with attorney Paul Messing representing four religious groups who've been engaging in Parkway “feeding” for years, arguing that the rule violated their constitutional rights to religious practice and free speech.
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