April 21-27, 2005

cover story

ShortChanged

STILL WAITING: Three houses surrounding Javier Lopez's home burnt down more than a decade ago. The charred shells remain. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

$115,000 in missing government funds may not seem like a lot, but it's everything to the residents of Hunting Park.

by Brian Hickey

On a short stretch of Butler Street between Percy and Delhi, there once stood a playground. One day about 20 years ago, the neighborhood kids walked through a gate and dipped their hands in cans of paint. They decorated the park's wide flowerpots and knee-high green walls with all the colors of the rainbow. Someone coated a paintbrush in white and wrote "God Loves You" for everyone in this sliver of Hunting Park to see.

In those better days, the kids safely dangled and maneuvered their way through a spherical jungle gym. They bounded through the small, kid-designed hopscotch course. But those better days are long gone. This one-time block of fun stands as a testament to urban decay, a symbol of taxation without adequate representation.

On a sunny, warm April morning, shards of brown and clear bottles sparkle on the lot's ground, not far from the mounds of trash containing busted inhalers, Popeye's boxes and a mangled Isley Brothers' disc. A drawing of a smoking gun, complete with billowing post-shot smoke, decorates the cracked blacktop. Rust mars the jungle gym. Yellow, blue and red handprints remain, but nothing grows in the dark gray flowerpots.

In the midst of it all sits a set of red stairs. Up five of them is a platform. Perhaps it once led to a sliding board, as one woman living nearby recalls, but it's hard to tell now. Today, it ends at nothing but a drop to the ground where the broken-glass confetti waits for, at best, a knee to rip wide open. Overhearing a discussion about what the apparatus might once have been, a passerby stops in his tracks on Butler and peers through the fence.

CLEAN SWEEP: Barbara Landers' home on Ninth Street bears none of the scars of other decrepit properties in Hunting Park. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

"That," he hollers, "is a good question."

A block away, Javier Lopez opens the front door of his three-story house and eases down his porch stairs toward North Eighth Street. In his hand, he carries a few bills to be mailed. A few yards down the block, a neighbor meticulously sweeps the street in front of his row home, even though signs are posted nearby for a weekend neighborhood cleanup. Pride, it seems, can't wait a couple days.

Lopez has pride, too. But when he turns around and looks at his home, it becomes painfully clear that he resides on a forgotten urban island. To his right, a burnt-out shell blights the 3800 block of North Eighth. So do the two charred properties to the left. Aesthetics and safety aren't Lopez's only problems.

"I live," he sighs, "with the roaches."

Lopez seems resigned to his predicament. It's for good reason. These homes didn't burn down yesterday. No, explains Lopez, the fires were extinguished 11 years ago and nobody has done a thing to help since. No NTI bulldozers. No L&I demolitions. No exterminators. No nothing.

When the conversation switches to the woman around the corner, the one who got arrested a day earlier for allegedly pilfering state grant money earmarked for neighborhood improvements, Lopez gets agitated.

"I'm mad," he blurts out, speaking rapidly to a translator. "That's tax money, our tax money. If it was legal, I'd go in and start taking, too, but the money would be used for something good."

Alas, Lopez has no ties to the neighborhood's state representative, the one who reportedly helped guide public funds toward his longtime aide's civic organization, Concerned Black Leaders of Lower Tioga/Hunting Park. Lopez is just a run-of-the-mill tax-paying citizen, and that just isn't enough in these parts.

Two minutes pass. Lopez has put more than enough thought into embezzlement. He turns around and marches back up the steps. The bills won't get mailed until later.

"People like him," says translator Emilio Vazquez, a Parking Authority worker who unsuccessfully tried to dethrone state Rep. Bill Rieger in last year's absurd 179th District race, "just want to see all this blight go away."

By now, a federal jury may have put the finishing touches on Philadelphia's latest corruption scandal trial. Headlines about bankers, shady businessmen from Detroit and brazenly untrustworthy city treasurers should soon fill the recycling trucks. The people of Hunting Park won't be able to forget about bad government anytime soon, though. They still wallow in its wake daily.

It'd take millions — probably billions — to restore this neighborhood to a level of comfortable livability. Residents don't expect fiscal miracles; sporadic baby steps would do. So when Barbara Landers, a 64-year old Ninth Street resident whose home once served as an Election Day polling place and Rieger's district office, was charged by state investigators last week with theft of Department of Community and Economic Development grants, more frustration came to Hunting Park. It wasn't about the money, altogether. One hundred and fifteen thousand bucks wouldn't have saved the day. Locals said it was also about the principle.

"She's a monster!" yells Tyrone Burton, a 31-year Percy Street resident, when he hears Landers got arrested. "This is long overdue. Long overdue, man."

When he first saw a few strangers walking across the side street with notebooks and cameras, Burton asked if "they were gonna do something about that," motioning to the two homes next to his, the ones about to lose street access thanks to the porch roof that probably won't be attached to its crumbling building's facade much longer.

Burton lives within a block of Landers. He has seen the meticulously cared for potted plants out on the sidewalk that was free of litter until street-paving crews moved in Friday and left a layer of dust behind. He remembers how Landers once got nailed in an absentee-ballot scandal.

"I could go on and on and on about this one. On. And on," says Burton. "This neighborhood is just going down and down and down, and you can't get anything done to stop it. I don't know why these people keep voting for Rieger. He's not doing anything! If you're not one of those people with their nose up [Rieger's and Landers'] keister, you're out of luck."

To blame one or two people for a generations-long neighborhood decomposition is folly. But the tale of Rieger and his aide Landers goes a long way to defining Hunting Park in 2005.

The 82-year-old state representative was first elected to office in 1967. Once an enclave for European immigrants, demographics have shifted toward black and Hispanic. Today, it's among the commonwealth's poorest districts. What hasn't changed is Rieger's ability to oil the Democratic Party machine just enough to get back into office, which is what he did just last year despite a mountain of bad press.

Much of it came from Inquirer investigations that found: a) Rieger missed 97 percent of the meetings for the committee he chaired over a four-year period; b) Though he rarely voted in the Statehouse, machines were manipulated to make it seem as if he did; and c) He didn't even live in his district. In 2003, when news broke that Rieger paid Landers more a month to use her basement as a neighborhood office ($575) than most neighbors ponied up for their homes (an estimated $500 monthly rent), he turned a corner barbershop into a legislative branch.

Stories that paint an official as a poster child for bad government tend to kill political careers, even if the party brass said Rieger's experience in Harrisburg is a boon for his district. (He's been there long enough to know how politics work, and how to use that experience to help his constuents, their argument goes.)

But the publicity didn't faze Rieger, who said in a pre-election interview with City Paper, "They can write anything they want. I don't see much of a problem [getting re-elected]. I know what I gotta do. If you had to bet on a horse, you better bet on mine." He then noted that FDR was his hero.

Rieger's fledgling opponents — two Hispanics and one African-American — tried to rally residents. They told them they were neglected, that their elected official couldn't care less about them. They pushed for after-school programs, safer neighborhoods, cleaner lots and, in the words of one, "representation for a change." Alas, there would be no change; Rieger was easily sent back to Harrisburg. There, he started attending more sessions, and just last week, there was a light on inside his home off Rising Sun Avenue. (Locals figure it's hooked to a timer). All was not well, though, since there was a scandalous undercurrent still swirling. And it involved Landers.

Though she and her group have thrived in relative obscurity, Landers has popped up in the public eye from time to time. Sometimes, the ink was good; most of the time, it wasn't.

In 1990, Landers found herself prominently quoted in an Associated Press story about the National Night Out against crime. Of Hunting Park, she told the nation, "The kids are out here playing. ... We're all having fun here tonight."

Four years later, Landers wasn't having all that much fun. Instead, she was found guilty of 30 misdemeanors relating to an absentee-ballot scandal that booted Rieger's nephew, Bill Stinson, from a state Senate race. (Among the accusations: Landers urged ineligible voters to file absentee ballots.)

"It's their word against mine," she told the Inky when the story broke. At the time, it was a major political scandal, bigger than any missing grants, but Landers survived the storm.

"I'm just glad that it's over," she said after being fined, given a suspended prison sentence and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service in August 1994.

Though on probation for her voter-fraud conviction, she still worked outside polling places.

Five months later, according to state records, she incorporated Concerned Black Leaders of Lower Tioga/Hunting Park, a nonprofit aiming to "increase citizen participation of community functions."

"People have been held hostage," she said at a mural dedication in the nearby Badlands, as it was trying to emerge from a lawless era in 1998. "Finally, things are changing."

Not really.

Between 2000 and 2003, the nonprofit received — thanks to Rieger — numerous grants from the state Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED) to run civic programs and cleanups. Before long, though some computers were apparently purchased for a neighborhood school, questions arose as to whether all that money was being put to proper use. To look around the 20-block radius of Hunting Park that was supposed to benefit, the logical answer would be that it wasn't.

Investigators with DCED and the state attorney general's office reached the same conclusion, which was impossible to miss considering that a City Paper weekend tour of nine of the sites listed in the complaint showed no signs of being rejuvenated.

After a two-year probe, investigators announced April 13 that Landers was being charged with pocketing a chunk of the $115,000 in grants received since 2000. The money was supposed to "support improvements in the community including repairs to homes and improvements to various sites." Among the state's findings:

• Landers submitted a $7,290 receipt for paint. The problem? Venango Hardware owner Ronald Marcinkowski told investigators he never sold it to her. The second problem? Marcinkowski's shop closed two months before the date on Landers' receipt. ("During an Oct. 1, 2003 OIG interview, Landers admitted she fabricated the Venango receipt," the complaint reads.)

• Landers submitted a $3,056.32 receipt for cyclone fencing — complete with the word "paid" on it — that didn't survive scrutiny because it was actually an estimate. (She admitted to writing the word "paid" on it, according to the complaint.)

• There were also the four receipts from a landscaping company with an office that was a vacant lot. (She told investigators she shouldn't have submitted them, the complaint says.)

• Finally, Landers told investigators she spent $6,000 "for dinner with music and an open bar" and had sponsored "community picnics, a summer youth program, expenses for students, lumber and holiday celebrations." She had no supporting paperwork.

Despite the damning evidence, Landers' attorney Daniel D. McCaffery says people in Hunting Park should not equate the arrest with thoughts that she'd been stealing from the poor to give to herself.

"From my understanding, and she told this to the Attorney General's office, most of the receipts she had were destroyed in a flood. What got her in trouble was making up a phony invoice" for the fences, he says, blaming much of the problems his client faces on poor bookkeeping. "It's not like this woman is living in North Philadelphia with a 42-inch plasma-screen TV, driving around in a Mercedes. If you can prove someone is living beyond their means, it's not a leap that they're using the money for their personal benefit. You don't have that here. She's a great-grandmother who grew up there, who has spent 30 years working to make her community a better place. Everybody I've spoken to says she's a nice woman who's done a great job."

ROOF DECAY: Tyrone Burton worries that his neighbors' porches could collapse and hurt someone. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

As Vazquez turns down another block, keeping a running tally of how many vacant buildings there were, he says he grew up around here, moved away but came back a couple years ago and recently purchased a shell nine doors down from Landers' house. With the weather breaking, he plans to open the boarded-up windows and get to work. First, he'll have to shoo away the stray cats that have taken up his residence.

"I'm going to fix it up and live there with my family," he says. "I could have gone anywhere, but I want to stay here. This is where I'm going to be."

As he walks around, he exchanges pleasantries in Spanish, and when the words "Barbara Landers" seeps through in English, expressions change. There are looks of disgust, dismissive hand waves and palpable frustration. An older Latino man looks at a reporter and says just one word: "Bad."

Over at 10th Street and Rising Sun, Landers and her upcoming May 26 arraignment in Harrisburg are also topics of conversation at the office of the Hunting Park Neighborhood Advisory Committee (NAC), a city-funded agency charged with helping the area save itself. Executive director Rodnell Griffin says she has a personal relationship with Landers. She doesn't want to bash her, considering Landers is only accused, not convicted, of a crime. Griffin maintains that the paperwork defense may not entirely be bogus; those forms are hard to fill out, after all.

"I want to say that [Landers'] concern for the neighborhood is passionate," Griffin says. "And, she's not the only one who's misused funds, if indeed she's done this."

After Griffin adds that Landers should be held accountable if found guilty of the charges, the conversation then turns to numbers, namely what the NAC could have done to improve Hunting Park with $115,000.

"When you look at the monies Mrs. Landers allegedly misused, it's a small drop in the bucket. It wouldn't go very far considering the devastation we have here, but far enough to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the poor," says Griffin, whose group has been trying to reverse bad trends here since 1989. "Of course it's frustrating. It could have been used for housing, senior assistance, people could use it to assist with youth programs, overall neighborhood beautification, changing behaviors."

Though she says she was upset that there was a lack of thorough oversight on how the grants were allegedly spent, Griffin doesn't agree with the theory that she works in a forgotten neighborhood. Holding out dreams of building a multiethnic community center to serve as a gathering place and social-services hub, she prefers to see it as "contrary to external beliefs, on the rise again."

Vazquez hopes she's right, but the Hunting Park he sees shows no signs of a looming rebirth. He need only point to three places to make his case: Javier Lopez's home amidst charred shells, the porch roof next to Tyrone Burton's place and the lot that was once a playground.

One hundred and fifteen thousand? It's about enough for the city to entirely rehab one home through the NTI program (so it could conceivably go a long way toward funding a couple demolitions, leaving Lopez with a freestanding, roach-free residence). And if it can redo a whole house, well, two porch-roof rehabs wouldn't come close to emptying the kitty, leaving Burton safe to walk down his block without worrying about being buried under a landslide of decay. Heck, Vazquez thinks he could entice developers to come up this way and build new homes at $40,000 to $50,000 a pop.

And a playground, well, the All Access Pass playground for sale on www.gametime.com comes with three slides, a jungle gym and a slew of other diversions for up to 45 kids ages 5 to 12 at a retail price of $19,863. Throw in, say, $3,056.32 worth of cyclone fencing and $7,290 in paint with a fresh layer of blacktop for roughly $15,000 and the block of Butler, between Percy and Delhi, would again serve as a place where kids could dip their hands in paint to dedicate a new urban utopia.

If that sounds like an oversimplification, Vazquez doesn't buy it. He says he knows good things could happen in Hunting Park if only the tax-paying citizens were properly represented at the Statehouse, a realization that has him mulling a neighborhood field trip to Harrisburg for locals to demand Rieger's resignation. Perhaps he's just ramping up for another run at Rieger's office, but Vazquez says it's time for a change. A big change is the only way to reverse what his neighborhood's become.

He takes one look up Ninth Street at Landers' house. Then, he considers the tire-filled back yards behind vacant shells mere steps away from Rieger's. He doesn't like what he sees.

"These politicans, five, 10 years down the line, they forget where they came from, but I don't," he says. "This is my neighborhood."