Due to the state budget impasse, cash is really running low. Full press release from the Mayor’s office is below; essentially, the city had expected state payments it hasn’t received because Harrisburg hasn’t passed a budget. The city is also hoping for the state to allow it to raise the sales tax by 1%. That is very much not a guarantee and we may see big cuts instead — but these payments will get made regardless, is my understanding.

Philadelphia, July 17, 2009 – The City of Philadelphia has informed Harrisburg lawmakers that, due to the State budget impasse, the City is forced to delay spending on anything other than employee compensation, debt service, and emergencies.  This means that all payments to vendors and suppliers will be delayed until the passage of the State budget and passage of legislation authorizing an increase in the City’s sales tax and changes to its pension payments.  This step comes as the City faces a growing cash crisis which must be addressed immediately.

“I have made repeated trips to Harrisburg over the last several weeks and I know that lawmakers are working hard to pass a fair and balanced budget,� said Mayor Nutter.  “That said, the delay in the State budget process is severely impacting the City’s cash flow and we have no option but to take these difficult steps.�

The budget crisis in Harrisburg has had a more damaging impact on the City this year because Philadelphia is asking for critical items to balance the City budget – the authorization of the temporary sales tax increase and pension reforms.  These two items will generate $250 million in new revenues and savings in our current FY 10 budget, and provide $700 million over the course of the Five-Year Plan.  Without legislative action very soon, the City will be unable to complete a routine cash flow borrowing at an affordable rate as it normally does each year.

In addition, until a State budget is approved, the City will not receive any of the normal state reimbursements for services like child welfare services and juvenile detention.  In total, those reimbursements are about $100 million that are traditionally received at the end of August.

The City also announced that all new capital projects will be under stringent review. Over the next few days the City will review every capital project and will determine which can proceed in the absence of the passage of the State budget and the passage of legislation authorizing the City to raise the sales tax by 1% and make changes to its pension payments.

If the State budget is resolved and the legislation authorizing the sales tax and pension reforms (HB 1828) is approved in the very near future, the City will be able to avoid this cash crisis.

Give our money back, you two!

If you’re like me, when people started floating the whole “hey, the Eagles owe the city $8 million!” thing, you looked at it with some skepticism: If the Eagles owed the city 8 mil, why wouldn’t someone have said something about it before? Plus, the amount seemed disproportionately small to the attention being paid to the debt. I kind of expected the whole thing to go away. Nope. Today, a judge ruled that the Eagles owe Philadelphia the full amount. Wow!

EXCEPT. The city also apparently owes the Eagles some money, due to a canceled preseason game from 2001. Probably not as much as the Eagles owe the city, according to Philly Clout … but maybe almost as much. Chris Brennan reports: “It appears the Eagles are going to come out of this dispute owing the city somewhere between $0 and $3 million, if next week’s ruling by Sheppard tracks with recent negotiations concluded by attorneys for the Nutter administration and the football team.”

I wonder how much the city spent in legal fees to hash this out? Oh well. Going after this money strikes me as the kind of thing the city needs to do, if only for symbolic reasons. But the Eagles are not going to save us from our budget woes.

Hey, Lynne Abraham is a woman in politics! But, she’s retiring.

Thought I’d highlight this story by Catherine Lucey about why there are so few women in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania politics. Of course a lot of universal explanations about gender inequality apply here, but only up to a point: Women aren’t only outnumbered by men in politics here, but are outnumbered more than they are elsewhere. Pennsylvania is ranked 46th among states for percentage of women in the state legislature.

local participation still pales in comparison to that in other cities and states. Atlanta and Baltimore have women mayors. Michigan, Alaska and Connecticut are among the states with female governors. More than 35 percent of the state legislators in Colorado, Vermont and New Hampshire are female.

So what’s up? The best answer Lucey can come up with, talking to various experts and interested parties, is that we have a particularly strong old boys’ network here.

Reasons cited by experts for the dearth of women in elected office include the city and state’s entrenched political machinery, which often favors male candidates and protects male incumbents; limited efforts to actively recruit women candidates, and that there are few high-ranking female elected officials to help advance others.

This all makes sense, but you’d think the same things would apply elsewhere … and that they would be worse in more than just 4 other states.

Check out this sequence of events:

-Dave Davies asks the D.A.’s office for information about a case Seth Williams was involved with in his days as an A.D.A., that the McCaffery campaign was highlighting in an ad campaign. He wants to know if the plea agreement in the case was typical.

-Davies spends the afternoon talking to present and former prosecutors and other attorneys, all of whom say the agreement was ordinary. He doesn’t hear anything back from the D.A.’s office.

-At about 6 p.m., he hears from McCaffery’s campaign manager, who tells him that the D.A.’s office will be issuing a statement on the case. (Huh? Why would the McCaffery campaign know that?)

-At 7:30, he gets the statement, not answering his initial question — were the terms of the agreement typical — but “seemed crafted to raise suspicions about Williams’ role,” Davies writes.

-Davies asks to examine the file the statement was based on. He’s told it’s confidential.

You can click through the link to read Davies’ conclusion about all this. I’ll just add that it seems likely to be forgotten, now that the race is over and Williams triumphed anyway, and that that sucks, because it sounds pretty unsavory.

Bruce Schimmel

Bulldog Beheaded

OK, so maybe not the most interesting election day in Philly history yesterday. But I think Alan Tu has hit on what, to me, is the most intriguing question this morning: What the hell happened to Brett Mandel? As Tu says, it’s not strange to see a Democratic incumbent (Alan Butkovitz) holding on to his seat. And that seemed even more likely in the context of a low-interest, low-turnout race. But it seemed to me that if anyone was going to make noise in a race like that, it would be a guy who a) made a name for himself by being a noisy advocate for several years, b) ran a loud, noticeable campaign featuring a bulldog mascot, and c) campaigned really, really hard, including going 100 hours straight up to the closing of polls (no one will be able to tell Mandel he didn’t give it his all). And yet Mandel appears to have come in third. Does a plush mascot get you nothing anymore?

Seth Williams appears set to be the Democratic nominee for D.A., and likely the next District Attorney; Alan Butkovitz has won his race to remain Controller. Philly.com has pretty charts so if you want to know more, you should go there.

Yes, really, the polls are open today for the primary races for District Attorney, Controller, and a number of judicial seats. Dan UA at YoungPhillyPolitics just sent around an email saying:

The polls are open, and they are empty. West Philly is dead. In Fairmount, 20 people voted by 9 o’clock. In Germantown, it was about a third of that.

Come on, there won’t even be any lines. If the spirit moves you at all, stop at the polls on your way home — if you haven’t moved since November, it’s the same place you went to go vote for Obama. Otherwise, you can check your polling place here.

Don’t know who to vote for? Look:

Here’s our D.A. who’s-your-candidate quiz.

Here are the Inquirer’s endorsements (Seth Williams for D.A.)

Here are the Daily News‘ (McElhatton for D.A.)

Here are the Philly-for-Change and Neighborhood Networks slates.

And for what it’s worth, this morning I voted for Seth Williams, Brett Mandel, and a number of judicial candidates including Diane Thompson and Dan Anders (that’s just me … CP didn’t do endorsements this time around).

Happy civic engagement.

Andrew Thompson

You just saw this picture…it’s still Mark Alan Hughes

Brian Howard told you last night that Mark Alan Hughes is leaving his post as Philly’s Director of Sustainability. We had the chance to speak to Hughes; he indeed says (as the press release said, and as you might have expected) that he feels he’s accomplished the main thing he intended to do: Setting up benchmarks and raising expectations for the green future of Philadelphia. Now that we have the Greenworks Philly plan (a to-do list to make Philly the greenest city in America by 2015), he says, people can “talk about [Philly becoming the greenest city in America] with a straight face.”

He also says that what surprised him most about life in the public sector is “how hard everybody works,” and that he misses “the time to think and read and reflect.”

The budget crisis, he says, may have paradoxically helped his cause. “It actually probably facilitated a lot of attention that Greenworks got,” because people associate green with efficiency and affordability. “This was much easier for us to pursue during the budget crisis than it might have been during happy times.”

Andrew Thompson Mark Alan Hughes (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

An announcement went out today that Mark Alan Hughes, Mayor Nutter’s Director of Sustainability, will be leaving the administration in June. On first blush it seems sudden. After all, there’s just so much sustaining left to do in Philly. But with the ambitious plan for Greenworks Philly in place, maybe Hughes, a true blue academic, felt it was fine leaving the implementing to the next guy/gal. After all, in Andrew Thompson’s chat with Hughes last june, Hughes specified that getting such a framework in place was priority numero uno.

Full text of the announcement after the jump.

MARK ALAN HUGHES ANNOUNCES DEPARTURE


Philadelphia, May 18 – Mark Alan Hughes, Director of Sustainability, announced today that he will be leaving the Nutter Administration.  His last day with the City of Philadelphia will be June 18th.

“Mark has been a tremendous asset to my administration and I wish him the best of luck in the future,â€� said Mayor Nutter.  “On sustainability and the Recovery Act, Mark has done what he came here to do.  He has put in place a foundation and a set of plans that will guide us to success.  Of course we will miss Mark, but my sense is that he will never be far away and always available if we need him.â€� (more…)

Hell if I know, but this is interesting: At last week’s debate between the Democratic candidates for Controller, Chris Satullo asked the candidates: “What in your opinion is the most wasteful department in the city?â€�

Alan Tu at It’s Our City rightly points out that a reasonable person hears this and thinks, “they’re not going to really answer this one.” But they did! IOC has the MP3 and some details, but in brief: Alan Butkovitz said License and Inspections, John Braxton said, “the criminal justice system. Because we have significant abuses of overtime both among police and prison guards.” And Brett Mandel got nuanced, saying that the criminal justice system probably has the most waste because it’s so huge, but that the most waste “per capita” was in Row Offices like the Sheriff, Register of Wills, etc.

It’s cool to have these candidates on the record about this stuff, so when one of them gets elected (and one of them will almost certainly get elected; sorry, Al Schmidt) we can hold his feet to the fire. “Where’s the report on the Register of Wills, Mandel?”

Last year, the City Commissioners office, which oversees elections, came under fire from YPP’s Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, among others, for not making election night returns available to the public in real-time. In August, the city committed in writing to begin doing so, and in November it did (though it spent $350,000 to set up the site, which, to me, sounds like a lot).

Then, yesterday, the commissioners declared that they won’t be making returns public for the upcoming May primary, because they’d have to spend $30,00o on “hosting fees” and didn’t have it.

Now Clout is reporting that Mayor Nutter promises that returns will be made available, live. The Department of Technology is stepping in to cover the costs. Says Nutter: “Having access to the information in 2009 should not be the technological challenge of the universe.” The Mayor’s office also says that, after this election, the city will have the capacity to do this stuff internally, so the extra fees won’t apply. I don’t really understand what that means, but it sounds like good news, because this all sounds like an awful lot of money.

Alan Butkovitz would like you to know he grew up poor, regardless of context.

There’s something quietly ridiculous about this paragraph, from a story about the Controller’s race in today’s Daily News:

On a lighter note each candidate was asked to reveal a little-known fact about themselves. Mandel said he enjoys singing Motown classics and going to karaoke bars. Braxton said he relieves stress by daily exercise. Butkovitz said he grew up poor.

Technically, I guess, that could be a little-known fact, but you gotta love how Butkovitz doesn’t get the game. And how the DN obstinately calls the exchange a “lighter note” anyway.

Harris Sokoloff, who organized the city’s budget workshops for the Penn Project on Civic Engagement, weighed in this week with his thoughts on how seriously Nutter took public feedback in crafting his budget proposal. After the budget came out, it seemed fair to credit Mayor Nutter with trying hard to preserve services, as people had asked, but with refusing to budge on citizens’ requests that our wage taxes be raised. (Instead, he has produced a substantial property tax hike, and a sales tax hike). In his budget address, he attempted to justify these decisions explicitly in the context of citizen preferences.

In an e-mail he sent out, Sokoloff writes:

We have an answer to the most common taxpayer question at the Tight Times, Tough Choices budget workshops:  is the Mayor serious?  Will he really take the work we do seriously?  Will it have any effect on his budget?

The answer seems to be “Yes, mostly….”

He elaborates at It’s Our City:

It seems fair to credit the Mayor with continuing the conversation, if somewhat pugnaciously. He has demonstrated that he was serious when he said he’d listen to what came out of the PPCE’s budget workshops.

I think this is right — I think the mayor did listen carefully to what citizens said (no dog and pony shows, those budget workshops), didn’t take it as gospel, but engaged with people on those subjects where he disagreed. Except for one thing. A lot of what Nutter wants to do with his budget is predicated on getting help from the state, and the state, as we know, is eager to start seeing those casino revenues flow. And on that subject, I don’t think Nutter has been particularly engage-y — indeed, very little effort has been made to find out what the people of Philadelphia think about this issue (I don’t remember gaming coming up at the budget workshop I went to). The budget and gaming are often treated as separate issues, but, as Isaiah Thompson notes here, casinos are very much in the middle of everything.

Illustration by Evan Lopez

It sure felt good, a few weeks back, when Mayor Nutter started taking it to Council, questioning members’ use of City cars, the DROP program, etc. It felt good because most of us think a seat on Council is a bit too cushy of a job.

Now, however, Council is fighting back — questioning representatives of the mayor’s office about the size of Nutter’s staff. And while this may be fair criticism, I’m pretty sure the the purpose of the queries isn’t to get the mayor to reduce his staff and save money. It’s to send a message to Nutter: Don’t mess with us.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure the primary purpose of Nutter aiming for Council wasn’t to save money, either. There’s not a lot of money to be saved on Council, in the long run. The criticism was a symbolic gesture, in response to public outcry.

Now, symbolism matters. The city can’t sell tax hikes and cuts to vital services if the top of its bureaucracy is overpaid and overstaffed. But the question is, how much does symbolism matter? We’d all like to see some big shots taken down a couple pegs these days. But it looks like, in pursuit of symbolism, elected officials have entered into a time-wasting internecine spat. And I’ll bet the end result is just the big shots agreeing to leave one another alone.