|
|
|
Archive: January, 2013
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
The Newspaper Guild has reached a tentative two-year contract with Interstate General Media.
The union representing newsroom employees opened their contract early after the newish owners of The Inquirer and Daily News reportedly threatened to liquidate the papers in a week's time. The Guild then protested that the owners were demanding a new performance review to weaken seniority--and potentially push out older reporters.
The proposed contract, according to the Guild e-mail below, includes a performance review with strong worker protections, and guarantees that both papers will be printed as dailies for the duration of the contract. That last point indicates that the owners are considering moving to a few-times-a-week print schedule, a model that has now been implemented at papers like The New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Councilman Brian O'Neill's legislation proposing sweeping, restrictive changes to zoning in certain commercial districts has been rolled back significantly already: controversial bans on urban gardens and farm markets, artist studios, prepared food shops and dry cleaners have been eliminated. Now, the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia and the administration may win yet another change to the legislation, which also restricts many commercial structures in CMX-2 and CMX-2.5 from including multiple residential units. The bill prohibits multifamily use if the nearest adjacent residential district is single family.
Eva Gladstein of the City Planning Commission met with O'Neill yesterday, and says he agreed to amendments to the bill. O'Neiil did not respond to an email from City Paper.
In a letter to City Council, Anne Fadullon, vice president of the industry group called that denser mixed-use development "crucial to the lifeblood of Philadelphia’s commercial corridors. In many cases allowing multifamily residencies on the upper floors is the revenue difference between restoring a storefront building to use or letting it remain vacant."
If Philly.com commenters are anything to go by, Philadelphians' affection for our dailies is of the tough love variety. A group of advocates is hoping that genuine support for the Inquirer and Daily News lies beneath the vitriol.
Save Philly Papers, a campaign organized by activist-about-town Marc Stier, has started an online petition and is planning other actions to call attention to the plight of reporters, who have been pushed by new owners to renegotiate their contracts and most recently eliminate the role of seniority from contract negotiations. Owners had promised "patient capital" and then recently threatened to "liquidate" the papers if more favorable contracts could not be obtained.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Republican Gov. Tom Corbett will tomorrow address the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce at the Academy of Natural Sciences. People will, of course, be protesting.
"The last few times the Governor visited Philadelphia, we gave him a great un-welcome, and now it’s time to do it again," according to the Facebook invite.
They will likely protest Corbett's deep cuts to education and services for the poor, prison construction, voter ID, and unregulated and lightly-taxed natural gas drilling. Among other causes.
6 ABC's Matt O’Donnell will ask the governor questions that Chamber members submitted online before hand, "everything from transportation to pension reform to welfare budget," according to the Chamber's Liz Ferry.
In Philly, zoning can be a messy process, what with sometimes-conflicting input from neighborhood groups and residents living close to a project. Here's a new twist: A group of neighbors that filed an appeal against a zoning variance granted by the city's Zoning Board of Adjustment were seeking a payout in return for not filing further appeals.
The blog Philadelinquency has emails back and forth from appellant Doug Risen and developer Eugene Bukh, in which Risen appears to be seeking a payout of at least $95,000 for him and his neighbors to forego an appeal to Commonwealth Court regarding development plans for 1701 South St. (Their appeal to Common Pleas Court was already denied.)
"Did I feel like they were extorting me? 110 percent, yes," says Bukh, of PP Development.
Embattled Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, who recently agreed to a settlement regarding dozens of ethics violations, has a history of financial trouble relating to her home on the 2400 block of North 52nd Street, in the city's Wynnefield neighborhood.
In a scandalous report released by the Board of Ethics Monday, the councilwoman admitted that she pocketed campaign contributions and "borrowed" $3,300 from Chaka "Chip" Fattah Jr. to prevent her house from falling into foreclosure after an acrimonious split with her husband, Howard Brown, in 2010. The Browns jointly own the stately, 5,168-square-foot house, complete with a sprawling lawn and garage, valued at an estimated $374,000.
But court records indicate foreclosure was nothing new to the Browns. The house, purchased in 1994 for $175,000 according to Office of Property Assessment records, had previously fallen into foreclosure in 2002. Court records indicate the foreclosure was settled with Wells Fargo Bank in April of that year.
Later, in 2007, 2008 and 2011, the Browns were involved in four settlements with the Philadelphia Gas Works, likely relating to unpaid bills, according to Philadelphia Common Pleas Court records.
Follow on Twitter @DanielDenvir
Pennsylvania is one of the "Terrible Ten" states with the most regressive tax structures nationwide, hitting the poor hardest while taking the least from the rich, according to a new report from the liberal Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC) and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
"No one would deliberately design a tax system where low-income working families pay the greatest share of their income in taxes, but that is exactly the type of upside-down tax system we have in Pennsylvania,” according to a release from PBPC director Sharon Ward.
View galleryFollow on twitter at @rw_briggs
As residents in Philadelphia brace for the impact of a drastic restructuring of the city's property tax assessment process, known as the Actual Value Initiative (AVI), Democratic state legislators held a conference yesterday at the Constitution Center to collect testimony in support of a package of state laws crucial to AVI's implementation.
Much of the meeting was dedicated to figuring out how much, precisely, to try and squeeze Philadelphia's yuppifying neighborhoods in favor of low-income, longtime homeowners.
"I have some people in my district who have seen their home value go up six or seven times," said state Sen. Anthony Williams. "What do you do for the person who bought a house for $30,000 that's now worth $400,000?"
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.
 |
| No surviving rendering, so here's a conjectural one transposed onto an aerial photo from its time. Original image form Google. |
2901 Walnut St. -- During the late 1980s/early 1990s building boom in Philadelphia, scores of office building proposals were getting built with little to no effort. West Market grew like a motherfucker and there was no end in sight. Nonetheless, the wall on development had to come down sometime, and, like 1777 JFK and the Corestates Financial Center, some proposals got their asses kicked out of existence. Unlike those two, this one, if built, would have been a massive disappointment and would have probably looked like shit. Not only that. Philadelphians were against this one the day it was proposed.
It all started in 1989. At that point, it seemed like Philadelphia's new melange of big-ass buildings was never going to stop. The U.S. Postal Service wanted to jump on the bandwagon and develop the 14 acres of land along the Schuylkill it had been using as a parking lot since the 1950s (though the lot didn't expand to full size until 1973). The USPS intended to turn the huge area of land into a complex of at least 5 mid-rise buildings over the course of the next decade. They called out to developers for proposals and got numerous responses. Nonetheless, two years went by without progress and the real estate crash happened during that time. They ditched the idea of starting the complex with a Phase One of two small buildings and decided that it would be better to build one extremely wide 12-story box meant to house all of the city's Federal offices. It was named the Philadelphia Federal Center.
This building was meant to be as exciting as a 12-story building could get. One million square feet (equal to 40-story buildings elsewhere in the city) of flexible office space, 90,000 square feet of retail, three stories of underground parking, an employee fitness center, an 800-seat auditorium, and advanced (for 1992) telecommunications equipment.
The City's Ethics Board just announced a settlement with Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, and it's a convoluted one. There are a bunch of different campaign-finance law violations in play here, resulting in 165 material omissions and six material misstatements in her campaign committee's reporting over the 2011 election cycle.
But here's one of the strangest: Brown borrowed $3,300 from Chaka Fattah Jr. to help avoid foreclosure, didn't report that money, and then had her campaign committee pay Fattah back. According to the report, she repaid her campaign committee this past April, and then finally disclosed the issue to the ethics board.
Brown's campaign also accepted over-the-limit contributions from a PAC, called Progressive Agenda, and from its de facto treasurer John McDaniel (who was also Brown's campaign manager). "McDaniel did not tell Councilwoman Reynolds Brown that he and Progressive Agenda were making excess contributions to the Friends of Blondell Reynolds Brown," the Ethics Board Report concludes. Nonetheless, Friends of Blondell Reynolds Brown will have to give up $20,134, and pay the city $20,450 in penalties.
- ActiVman
- adventures
- Arts
- Ask A Man-About-Town
- Award Tour
- Awards
- Bad Idea Factory
- Beer
- Below the Curve
- Bikes
- Booze
- Brian Hickey
- BRT
- Budget
- Budget Fuss
- Business
- Casinos
- City Council
- City Hall
- CouncilMANIC
- CP Abroad
- CP in the Community
- Criminal Justice System
- Day Tripper
- Death and Taxes
- Delaware River
- Design
- DROP
- Drugs
- Dubious Distinction
- Elections
- End of Days
- Environment
- Fashion
- Film Fest
- Financial Meltdown
- FrackTrack
- Free Library
- Gambling
- Gay Stuff
- Get Lit
- Greenstorming
- guns
- Hall Monitor
- Health
- Health Care
- Hello, Kitty
- Holidays
- Ice Cubes
- Iggles
- Immigration
- In Memoriam
- Labor
- Lawsuits
- Letters
- LGBTQ
- Maps
- Marcellus Shale
- Media
- MMA
- Mummers
- Music
- MUST READ
- Mysterious Mysteries
- Nation
- News
- Non Sequitur
- Opinion
- PA politics 2010
- Parking Wars
- Parks and Recreation
- People Send Us This Stuff
- Philadelphia Police
- Philadelphia Union
- Philaphemera
- Philly From Scratch
- philly madness
- Photos
- Poverty
- PPA
- President Obama
- Print Edition
- Prisons
- Protest
- Readers Write
- Real Estate
- Rock Bottom
- Schools
- Science
- Screwing Philly
- SEPTA
- snow
- So Lush
- Soccer
- Sporting Life
- Sports Complex
- State Politicians
- State Politics
- Street Art
- Strike
- Stuff We Like
- Taxes
- Taxi Drivers
- Tech Fetish
- television
- The Budget Crisis
- The City Paper
- The CLOG
- The Human Condition
- The Mayor
- The Phightin Phils
- The World
- Things that make you go hm
- Tinfoil Hats Off
- Under the Table
- Under the Tables
- Urban Development
- Urban Planning
- urban wildlife
- Video Poker
- We Call Shenanigans
- Weather
- Web Junk
- Weekend Omnibus
- White House
- What We've Found
- Women's Issues
- Flyered Up!
- How 'Bout That Weather?
- it's always sunny in philadelphia
- Stu!
- Shopping
- get out
- 10-track mind
- ArtsFlash
- Bloggity
- Bruce Being Bruce
- Colleges
- Comedy
- Gigantic Surprises
- Hello Canary
- Hello Puppy
- errata
- get lost
- Inside The Fishbowl
- Library Closings
- Local Support
- Movies
- Murder
- Night Moves
- Recycling
- radio
- Scientology
- Sex
- Sixers
- Skeeze Police
- State Politicians Screwing Philly
- That's a cool stencil!
- Theater
- Things We See
- This Week
- This Week in Oates
- University City
- WIN
- What we don't heart
- trailer!
- what we heart
- Feeling Guilty
- Askadelphia.
- Broke in Philly
- Contest
- Dance
- Dear Paper Doll
- Do A Good Thing
- Education
- Film Fest Schism
- G20-20 Vision
- Goodbye
- Gossip
- Great American Heroes
- PATCO
- Pearl Jam Week
- Puppy
- Stars of the Photostream
- sustainability
- Lower Merion Webcam-Gate
- The Cycle
- Equality Forum
- Bureaucrat of the Week
- Animals
- ElectionEar
- Photostream
