October 30-November 5, 2003

slant

John Street for Mayor

by Howard Altman

John Street is the master of disaster, a guy who walks the high wire and wobbles, but never falls. For 25 years, he has often been thrilling to watch, this political Philippe Petit.

And right now, thanks to a federal corruption investigation into City Hall, the whole nation is watching. Even James Carville and his K Street cameras came to take in the action.

But as thrilling as it is to watch, two questions must be asked:

Where is this tightrope walk going?

And should it continue?

The answers to those two questions, from City Paper’s perspective, are not nearly far enough and a very begrudging yes.

Given the choice between Street and his Republican challenger, Sam Katz, we feel that John Street should be re-elected. But, while City Paper’s editorial board voted 7-to-1 in favor of Street, that support did not come without grave reservations.

We endorse him because, for many Philadelphians, John Street’s high-wire act has taken them to better places. We endorse him because, for many, the streets are safer and cleaner. Many had their first glimpse of a city snowplow the first snowfall after Street took office.

The schools are better.

Auto insurance rates are going down for the vast majority of Philadelphians.

For better, and worse, the Eagles have a swanky new home. The Phillies will have one come April.

But at every turn, Street has flirted with disaster.

And that’s just with his "successes."

Hence the reservations.

We’ll get to his failures later.

The Street Method

Street was able to wrangle tens of millions out of Harrisburg to help fund the schools. He managed to stave off then-Governor Tom Ridge's plan to turn the school system over to Edison. And he backed the teachers down from a strike.

But not without creating a crisis.

A crisis that Mayor-elect Street happily said he would create back when he sat down with City Paper's editorial board in December 1999.

I think that a financial crisis at the board in many respects will drive the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Street said back then.

So he created a crisis, intimating that he would allow the school district's well to run dry.

Street's rationale?

Students, he said in 1999, are going to get a better education because there will be more money spent.

Street used a pending teachers' strike during his first few months in office to fan the flames.

Whenever he's able, Street negotiates with a time bomb ticking down to a deadline, a pair of clearly defined options for his adversary to choose from and a feigned indifference as to which option gets picked, former CP staff writer Noel Weyrich wrote in a defining December 2000 cover story called The Street Method.

Street cleverly set up a virtual head-on collision between Gov. Tom Ridge and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, wrote Weyrich. [He] let it be known that he might want to invoke Act 46, a law that allows state government to take over ¹distressed' school districts.

That would have voided the teachers' contract, subjecting those employees to state work rules.

The ploy worked. The teachers voted to strike and walked out on a Friday, but the schools remained open. Faced with the threat of a state takeover and the unified Street-Ridge front, the teachers returned to the classrooms by the following Tuesday.

Street did what Rendell could not. And it would not be the last time.

For all his friendly salesmanship, Ed Rendell's repeated failed efforts to win additional state money for the school district was one of his greatest disappointments in office, wrote Weyrich.

Street employed the same basic MO for dealing with the ballparks.

For months, Mayor Street hemmed and hawed over the location of the Phillies' new ballpark like he was Hamlet.

Chinatown or not Chinatown.

That was the question.

Ultimately, he settled for not Chinatown, but South Philly.

Street used the threat of 10 more years at the Vet as a cudgel. Against the teams and City Council, where he created a crisis by shoving a highly complex land acquisition-and-demolition-and-construction deal down Council's throat.

There was great Sturm und Drang. Howling hues and cries of protest.

A Daily News editorial denounced it as tantamount to holding a multimillion-dollar gun to your own head.

At no small cost to taxpayers, many of whom cannot afford to attend games, the Eagles landed a new home and the Phillies have too.

Rendell, for better or worse, couldn't pull that off, either.

Creating crisis is also working, to an extent, with Operation Safe Streets and the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI). Both programs have lofty ambitions: the first to reduce crime with a highly visible, preventive police presence, the second to turn around decades of decay that stunts growth. And, like most directives out of Street's City Hall, Safe Streets and NTI are crises in the making. While each is facing a funding disaster, so much is riding on Safe Streets and NTI that the city may have no choice but to increase the flow of cash for both programs. (For a more detailed analysis of Safe Streets, see p. 13. For more information on NTI, turn to p. 11.)

Such is the Street style.

Create a conflagration. Make everyone rush in to put out the flames.

And damn what anybody thinks.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes it doesn't.

He is arrogant to a fault and in constant need of validation. He has a costly inability to think beyond entrenched process.

For weeks, he stepped over paramedic Mary Kohler, who was camped out in front of his office. She was there as a hepatitis C sufferer -- having contracted the disease on the job -- to protest Street's legal challenge to a recent firefighters' contract award.

He fired the city's airport chief, whom he had escorted off the property by armed gendarmes.

With a potential billion dollars' worth of African trade on the line, he blew off an important international conference, including a meeting with the prime minister of Cote d'Ivoire, where he left a government, trade officials and Secret Service fuming.

He fumbled the Convention Center's labor talks, leading to another state takeover and worse, the continued demise of Philadelphia's reputation as a place to come to spend your convention dollars.

And he did nothing to tame the insider's game benefiting those generous to his campaigns. It continued to fester and its foul effluvium begat bugs.

As he zips around the city, professing no knowledge of what events led to a federal corruption probe of his city, it is instructive to see what Street promised residents just before he took office.

First of all, we're going to be very deliberate and we're going to be careful and a little bit more calculated than some other people about how you organize the mayor's office to be able to have the reach that a mayor's office needs, Street told a CP edit board meeting in December 1999. Not necessarily ¹The Mayor,' but the office needs a certain reach into the bowels of the government to be able to make sure that the cop standing at 26th and Girard, or the L&I worker who's responsible for inspecting certain sites, is doing what we want them to do. The mayor's office has to have that reach. The mayor needs to know that somebody has that reach. And I think that there's got to be a half a dozen people who are responsible for implementing the policies of the mayor's office to the point where you have that reach.

That reach into the bowels has soiled this city. There is no excuse for Street not knowing exactly what is going on. And there is no excuse for stoking the embers of racial acrimony.

Sam Katz has many bold ideas. Cutting the wage tax by more than half a billion and borrowing $750 million to help run the city is the boldest.

The goal, he says, is to bring jobs back to the city -- more than 63,000.

On one side of City Line Avenue, they have a wage tax and a business-privilege tax and 200,000 square feet of office space, Katz told CP at a summer golf outing. The other side of the street, no wage tax, no business-privilege tax and 2.6 million square feet of office space one centimeter outside of the city limits of Philadelphia.

Sounds enticing, because it is far too difficult to do business in this city, a problem for which Street really offers no solution.

But, though it may sound like Philadelphia Failure Syndrome to say so, the Katz plan sounds too good to be true.

That's because we do not feel confident that Katz is the man who can sway a very doubting City Council -- Democrat to the core with members whose knives will be sharpened against a Republican who took down Street. And, if Jannie Blackwell were elected City Council president, Katz would face the additional uphill battle of taking on a formidable politician whose voter base would harbor a resentment against a white man taking down a black incumbent.

Even if he were to be effectual, we question the economics.

Street, for his part, borrowed hundreds of millions. For the stadiums, for Safe Streets, for NTI. But not for basic services.

We worry greatly that services will suffer as a result of the kind of revenue cut Katz is proposing. You cannot provide education, safety and quality of life without spending money.

There is another concern. The resulting shift in tax burden from wage earners -- including suburbanites who use this city -- to property owners could very well wreak havoc.

It could very well eliminate whatever gains city dwellers get from the value added to their property by the recent real-estate boom, a bonus deserved for sticking it out here. (Contrary to Vince Fumo's dire prediction, values went up.) And it could also stunt efforts to turn renters into owners. The Yorktown section of North Philadelphia -- where the mayor, who sent his four kids to public school, lives -- is proof that home ownership is the best way to fight blight.

Socially, Katz has his heart in the right place.

But where is his head?

As distasteful as many Street cronies are, and many of them really, really are, do we really want to turn City Hall over to someone indebted to Brian Tierney, whose social agenda we vigorously oppose? Do we want to give the keys to someone who gave $10,000 to Rick Santorum -- whose social policies we even more vigorously oppose -- just because Santorum supported Israel?

Do we want the next mayor to be someone who surfaces only to run for office and, when he was part of government, tanked it because the commitment was getting in the way of making dough?

We don't think so. And we won't even go there with Perzel and his crew. Or Ashcroft and his vile lot.

So, on Nov. 4, hold your nose and vote for Mayor John Franklin Street.

It isn't a perfect choice. Not even close.

Sadly, the best thing for Philadelphia may be four more years of high-wire derring-do.