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Archive: July, 2011
When Jim Foster ran as an Independent in the 8th Council District race in 2007, he cobbled together enough signatures to get on the ballot in just 10 days. That challenge wasn't formidable enough, apparently. This Tuesday, Foster began collecting signatures to join the race for the 8th as an Independent — that's just six days before Monday's deadline.
Foster, who is the publisher of Germantown Newspapers, says he made the last-minute decision at the behest of community members. He claims that Democrat Cindy Bass — the winner of this year's seven-way primary race for the 8th Council District seat — is "not responding to anybody's communication" and therefore is "using the [current Councilwoman Donna Reed] Miller playbook."
"From what we can discern," Foster wrote in an email to community members this morning, "the future for the citizens of the 8th Council District will be another developer-financed, inside dealing, public-be-damned operation with most decisions done in the dark."
Joe Corrigan, a spokesman for Bass, responded, "We look forward to running just as robust a campaign this fall" as they did earlier this year, and "building on our broad base of support."
Foster will need to collect 750 signatures by Monday to run as an Independent.
The Republican party is looking for a Municipal Court judge candidate to appoint to the ballot, since judge Jimmie Moore has retired to challenge Bob Brady for his Congressional seat. Michael Meehan, general counsel of the Republican City Committee, sent an email this week to ward leaders asking for recommendations.
Is Jim DiVergilis — the Common Pleas judge candidate who, while campaigning earlier this year, said he'd have "no problem" hitting people on the bench — being considered?
Vito Canuso, chairman of the Republican City Committee, says, "I would assume that he is." He declined to say who else is in the running. DiVergilis is a long shot in the Common Pleas race, and he would also be a long shot if he got the Republican nomination for Municipal Court.
A Democratic City Committee staff member declined to say who it is considering to put on the ballot. Relatedly, today's PhillyClout reports that local Democratic party chief Brady says that Teamsters Local 830 leader Dan Grace "expressed interest" in having DiVergilis appointed to the seat left empty by Common Pleas judge Renee Cardwell Hughes.
In the email, Meehan also noted that Francis Shield, a Republican nominee for Court of Common Pleas, has withdrawn.
In Philly, patronage is hardly seen as a sin. Newspaper headlines that warn of local pay-to-play, missing government funds or extortion barely quicken our heart rates. We're home to cops who sell drugs, a former Housing Authority director who covered up sexual harassment settlements, and a Sheriff's Office that couldn't find $53 million in assets.
It's gotten so bad that one local columnist said Philly is afflicted with "corruption fatigue." But is there anything we can do about it?
A. Benjamin Mannes, founder of Philadelphians for Ethical Leadership, certainly thinks so. He's holding a forum, which was featured in our Agenda section this week, so that folks can ask the local experts charged with rooting out corruption — City Controller Alan Butkovitz, FBI Special Agent John Roberts and the D.A.'s Office Chief of Special Investigations Patrick Blessington — what they're doing about it and how to squash it once and for all. (See the bottom of the post for event details.)
City Paper reached Mannes over the phone and asked him a few questions about corruption in our fair city.
City Paper: How do you see Philly? How corrupt do you think it is?
A. Benjamin Mannes: Philadelphia is a place that's teetering on the return to the greatness. We could go the way of Baltimore or Washington, or we could go the way of New York.
[Conservative blogger] Aaron Proctor says we're headed to Detroit, but I disagree: That was a one-industry town and everyone went jobless at once. Philly is not that. Philly is the most untapped resource on the Eastern seaboard. But the government is not exploiting that. We're not attracting business.
A 1894 Harper's magazine article that City Paper discovered (via Philly Speaks) describes North Philly as "by far the largest and most beautiful section of Penn's city" and "like Chicago on a very small scale, with the important advantage that it is much cleaner." It goes on to call Kensington "paradise," where "every laboring man is a landed proprietor and every woman the mistress of her own house," and nicknames Philadelphia "The City of Homes."
You can read an original clip of the piece here. Or here:
"North Philadelphia, which was referred to in the early part of this article as New Philadelphia, is by far the largest and most beautiful section of Penn's city, but it is for the most part of very recent date, and it has, I believe, no history.
I can describe it generally no better than to say that it is like Chicago on a very small scale, with the important advantage that it is much cleaner. The men who have made money in North Philadelphia have, for the most part, preferred to there live out their lives and have, with few exceptions, shown a desire to be accounted members of the society of old Philadelphia. They have built beautiful homes and great blocks of massive business houses. They have gone away from their own town and brought back all those things which give a home individuality and beauty.
There may be much that is showy and ostentatious in this new town, but its display is not of tinsel. In their homes, as in their offices and places of amusement, they have spent money with a lavish hand, and they have done it wisely.
North Broad Street has its own society and its own amusements. Theatrical companies move from the theatres of old Philadelphia to those of the new town with the knowledge that they will play to as different a community as if they had taken a railway journey of many hours. And yet the theatres may not be ten blocks apart. It is simply because they are on the opposite sides of that great dividing line — Market Street.
Still further north of this modern city lies Kensington, the paradise of small houses where every laboring man is a landed proprietor and every woman the mistress of her own house. There are miles and miles of these little brick homes, encircling the old town on all sides, with their white facings and marble steps. Here is the first cause of the prosperity, the vast magnitude, and, above all, the health and happiness of this great manufacturing city, in which the skilled laborer with small pay must necessarily play so important a part. Here also is to be found the inspiration for that name which so aptly tells the secret of the Philadelphian's love for his Philadelphia — 'The City of Homes.'"
Why was a loud-mouthed blogger suddenly silenced?
That’s what some political junkies have been wondering ever since phillydecline.com, a local politics blog, shut down this month without explanation. Aaron Proctor, the former site’s 29-year-old author and a self-described “Tea Party patriot,” has made a name for himself throughout the past few years for being a firebrand — even by Philly standards. He was celebrated (and hated) for sticking it not only to the usual suspects, like Arlene Ackerman and John Dougherty, but to fellow conservatives and local heroes, too.
He called the city’s finance department “Mayor Nutter’s Bitch Boys”; wrote that City Council candidate Michael Untermeyer smelled bad; and wondered “how many cans of Steel Reserve” GOP mayoral candidate Karen Brown drank before a debate. No one was safe — not even local leaders whose supporters, Proctor claimed on his site, routinely sent him hate mail. Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, who dedicated a 600-word article to Proctor, called him “part gadfly, part H.L. Mencken, part Howard Stern” and said he “won’t shut up.”
But then, out of nowhere, he did just that.
City Paper tracked down Proctor to see why he got out of the game. He quit, he says, for a few reasons. Click below to find out what those are.
The City's Redevelopment Authority has unique powers of eminent domain and condemnation, as well as the ability to sell land at less-than-market-rate prices (including nominal fees) for redevelopment purposes.
Over the past few decades, the RDA has acquired and disposed of thousands of properties for everything from individual side lots (quite a popular program, in fact) to large-scale housing and commercial developments. Nonprofits have received land from the RDA, and so have commercial developers.
Many of the parcels the RDA has conveyed have been developed; some have not.
Currently, the Nutter administration is undertaking an overhaul of the RDA and its processes for dealing with vacant land in general. The mayor has appointed a task force, headed up by representatives of the Redevelopment Authority and the Managing Director's Office, who are trying to create a “front door” for the public to access vacant land, which is currently held and dealt with by about a dozen different city agencies.
This list represents every RDA sale since 1986.
As part of our special Vacant Land Issue and collaboration with PlanPhilly, Technically Philly, and programmer Tis Wisniewski, City Paper obtained a list, current as of March 2011, of all land believed to be vacant in the city. Here's the raw data.
The spreadsheet is a compilation of two sets of data: properties believed to be vacant by the Office of Property Assessment and, additionally, a list from the Philadelphia Water Department of buildings for which water service has been shut off.
If you haven't seen it already, check out the interactive map created by Tim Wisniewski using City Paper's data, and showing properties that have been conveyed by the city's Redevelopment Authority that still (for various reasons) remain vacant.
A few notes:
— We can't vouch for the accuracy of this data which, we emphasize, is not current only of March 2011.
— "Vacant" land isn't necessarily "blighted" land: it may in use as side lots, gardens, green spaces, parking lots, etc.
— Google's "Street View" is a useful tool for seeing what some of these properties looked like in the recent past; it, like this data, is not up to date.
— This list almost certainly omits some vacant properties and incorrectly reports others.
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Today, City Paper's "Vacant Land Issue" hits the stands — but our print edition is just the beginning.
Of all the many vacant land issues being hashed out by the Nutter administration right now, one of the most pressing is when, how, for what price and under what conditions the city's Redevelopment Authority should sell or give away vacant land for redevelopment.
How did today’s front page Philadelphia Inquirer story by Andrew Maykuth on the promise of natural gas drilling (“Penn State report even more bullish on Marcellus Shale”) fail to mention the recent groundbreaking New York Times investigation that found “industry estimates might overstate the amount of gas that companies can affordably get out of the ground”?
Or, that “gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying, according to hundreds of industry e-mails and internal documents and an analysis of data from thousands of wells”?
The Inquirer did note that the “study is likely to generate considerable controversy. Anti-drilling activists said past Penn State reports overstated the jobs created by gas development and failed to count the cost of potential environmental problems of drilling.”
But the documents uncovered by The New York Times constitute a factual basis for the activists’ concern, and The Inquirer should have reported it. Indeed, I’m not sure they’ve ever reported on the Times’ natural gas findings.
Reporting is an iterative and incremental process, strengthened by important, already-available information. This is true even when that information was first reported by another (behemoth) outlet. In Pennsylvania we are undergoing fast and potentially risky changes to our landscape, water supply and economy. Readers deserve the most and best information they can get.
With the help of $18.2 million in grants from the 2009 stimulus, the Media Mobilizing Project, a Philadelphia-based non-profit — and past critic of the city's progress in narowing the "digital divide" in access to media between rich and poor —opened 5 new public computer centers on Friday along with ... the City of Philadelphia. Mayor Nutter himself was on hand at 42nd & Chestnut, one of the 5 locations being run by MMP, for the ribbon cutting.
According to site organizer Willie Colon, anyone can utilize the services and facilities offered at these centers, but the group has strategically placed these new technological hubs to align with their current efforts and initiatives. Colon said that the Media Mobilizing Project identified their target audiences and from there urged the city to give them the funds. The two worked simultaneously to acquire and spend this money, and Colon says that his organization is a "natural fit" to run these centers. A total of 77 public computing centers will open (some already have) under the stimulus funds, and five were put under the MMP.
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