Earlier today, “It’s Our Money” reported that Willie Brown, president of the Transport Workers Union Local 234 – the guys on strike – had told reporters that Mayor Nutter was “cut off” from future negotiations:

Nutter “has brought nothing� to the table, Brown said, adding, “I will not meet him� because of the attacks the mayor has leveled at the union.

About half an hour ago, Office of the Mayor Press Secretary Doug Oliver emailed me the following statement, reprinted here in its entirety:

The Mayor was only involved because he was asked to participate in the discussions.  To the extent that his participation is helpful, he’s willing to participate.  If his participation is problematic, he’s willing to stay out of the discussions.  It’s always been the Mayor’s position that his number one obligation is to the 1.5 million people who are trying to manage their way through this TWU strike.

There should be no reason why the negotiations can’t move forward.  But with a deal like the one that was offered (11% wage increases over five years and no increase in contributions to healthcare) during a time when so many people are taking pay decreases and even losing their jobs, one can’t help but wonder why a deal wasn’t struck already.  Again, if the absence of the Mayor is the only thing needed to strike a deal, the Mayor is more than happy to allow the negotiations to continue without his involvement.

When we buy a gallon of gas, we expect it to fill a gallon of our tanks. But do we ever stop to ask why? What prevents the gas station from cutting corners, or from unknowingly using a faulty pump?

In Philadelphia, the Weights and Measures unit of the Deparment of Licenses and Inspections stood in the way of both dubious business practices and common error. It checked scales and scanners for most things we buy, from gas to groceries, and investigated when consumers claimed foul play.

But in February, in response to the city’s massive budget deficit, L&I disbanded the 11-person Weights and Measures unit. The state has tried to fill the vacuum, but will replace fewer than half of the inspectors.

At the end of last year, the city asked L&I to make cuts. “We looked at what are the core services and ranked them,� says Fran Burns, Commissioner of L&I, by way of explanation. Weights and Measures, she says, came in at the bottom of the list. So, for a savings of over $400,000 annually, L&I laid off or transferred all the unit’s members.

Since February, state inspectors from southwestern Pennsylvania have conducted inspections in Philadelphia on an interim basis, responding primarily to consumer complaints. In a few weeks, the state plans to hire five full-time, Philly-based inspectors. They will be solely responsible for inspections in the city.

The state authorities have expressed confidence in their ability to handle the increased workload. “I would anticipate that we’ll be able to do the job in a timely fashion,� says John Dillabaugh, Director of the State Bureau of Ride and Measurement Standards, “and as well as the city of Philadelphia did.�

According to Gerald Buckley, President of the Pennsylvania Association of Weights and Measures (a trade organization), there should be one inspector for every 100,000 residents in the area. Right now, there’s one inspector for every 675,000 residents. When the new state inspectors start work, that number will go down. But there will still be just one inspector for every 289,000 Philadelphians.

By any measure, the state inspectors will have a lot on their plates. According to a 2008 report from the State Department of Agriculture, Philadelphia County accounted for one out of every ten inspections in the state. That work will now be done by half as many inspectors.

So what does this mean for Philadelphians? Some say the reduction in inspectors will allow business owners to exploit consumers.

“[Businesses owners] are picking everybody’s pocket,� says Lincoln Felder, a housing inspector with L&I. He believes businesses will alter their scales to increase revenue. “They won’t be killing [consumers] for $10 or $15. They’ll be hitting us for five or 10 cents a piece, nickel and diming us to death.�

Based on state records however, explicit exploitation is less common than simple error. According to the Bureau of Agriculture, the state levied just 37 fines statewide (not including Philly) in 2008 for intentional or repeated weights and measures violations.

But while it imposes few fines, the state routinely finds faulty devices. In 2008, state inspectors rejected almost 1 out of every 10 monitoring devices. With the halving of inspector positions in Philadelphia, the number of undetected faulty machines is likely to increase. Mistakes may go uncorrected. And consumers, mostly unaware of Weights in Measures, will remain in the dark.

“If you get bit by a dog, you know it,� says Buckley. “But if you buy a pound of hamburg, you don’t really know if it’s a pound of hamburg.�

–

Consumer complaints regarding weights and measures should be directed to the State Bureau of Agriculture at: 1 (877) TEST 007.

Evan M. Lopez

Over at It’s Our Money, Ben Waxman identifies a question/comment a lot of people have about Mayor Nutter’s doomsday budget, and answers it. The concern:

I have seen a number of comments on this blog and others accusing the mayor of resorting to scare tactics. Here is the rationale: Mayor Nutter is intentionally laying off cops and firefighters to get people upset and put pressure on the state legislature. He could easily cut other areas– health centers, libraries, and recreation programs– to make up the budget deficit.

The response:

There is just one problem with that logic: it’s completely wrong. Spending on public safety– police, fire, and prisons– dwarfs every other part of city government. About 29% of the city’s $4 billion budget goes to these costs. If the city is forced to cut $700 million from the budget, most of it will have to come from the areas where the money is.

That’s definitely right. The only thing I’d add is this: When I hear people talking about how wasteful the city is, they tend to talk about that waste very abstractly. They have this vision of a lazy city worker sitting somewhere, collecting a paycheck and waiting on a pension, but they have no idea what that worker actually does. The reality is most city workers are doing things society values. Working at rec centers, making the bureacracy function at L&I etc.

Are there lazy workers within those departments? Probably, just like there are lazy workers everywhere. But they’re not so easy for Mayor Nutter to just find and fire.

Now, there are a few items that get identified specifically as wasteful in these conversations. DROP, numerous council aides, the Mayor’s Office of Community Services. And they may be. But, as Ben says, with the size of deficit Philly’s facing, cutting these things is a drop in the bucket — and in some cases, for the Mayor, more procedural trouble than they’re worth.

UPDATE: This, however, from Ray Murphy at YPP, is a good point:

If there is any reason to be critical though it’d be the fact that the revenue agreement the Mayor and Council reached in the first place was predicated upon state action. It’s not like we didn’t know things would be tough in Harrisburg. The alternatives–raising property or wage taxes–came with other political risks that most members of Council and the Mayor weren’t willing to take.

Pew’s Philadelphia Research Initiative has just released a report on the cost of city employee benefits (pension and health care). It’s not pretty, particularly when it comes to pensions. Money quote from the press release:

Philadelphia’s city pension fund now has less than half the money it needs to make good on its obligation to past and current city workers. The fund has not been this severely underfunded since 1996, and there is little prospect that the picture will brighten appreciably in the next few years.

Basically, the city has been short-shrifting the pension fund for several years now — pushing the obligation down the road and hoping it becomes someone else’s problem. And one of our leadership’s solutions to the current budget crisis is to … short-shrift the pension fund.

If you’re relatively young and plan on living in Philly for a while, you can probably start looking forward to a day when you’re paying a lot of taxes for services rendered a long time ago.

Last week, a spokesman for D.C. 47, the city’s white collar workers union, criticized the timing of the report (before it came out — he had been briefed on some of the contents during the fact-checking process), saying that it coincided too closely with the expiration of the public sector unions’ contracts.

This seems crazy to me. Isn’t this the exact right time for a report like this, when the greatest number of people are talking/thinking/debating about public employee compensation? Pew is giving the public a sense of the scope of employee benefits. It’s up to the union now to make the case that those benefits are warranted, and that the city needs to find a way to pay for them, whether it be by raising taxes or what have you.

For American cities right now, there’s a bit of a race on for federal stimulus money, all $787 billion of it. Over the course of last week, it seemed Philadelphia had brought in a fair share of those dollars — $26 million for the airport here, $13 million for street repaving there.

Yesterday, June 17, the Nutter administration held a press conference announcing an additional $13.5 million the city’s public safety programs. How far will it go? Well, basically it’ll be allocated to a series of small

Thomas Dreisbach

safety-related programs and services, and to city offices currently shedding jobs.

The most radical proposal involves the construction of a “Real Time Crime Center,� to be housed at Police Headquarters at 7th and Race. The Center, which Police Commissioner Ramsey said was modeled after similar centers in New York and Washington, D.C., is supposed to provide in-depth information to officers in the field. The details of the Center’s operations remained inexact in both Ramsey’s and Nutter’s comments. According to the press release from the Mayor’s Office, the center carries a price tag of $2.5 million.

The Mayor has also designated $1 million for a joint program with Resources for Human Development, Inc., a Philadelphia-based non-profit. The program intends to create 160 “Green Jobs� for the ex-offenders residing in the city. Nutter said that the program creates “synergy� between the city’s economic, environmental, and public safety agendas.

The proposed employment program, though certainly helpful for the ex-offenders who receive “Green Jobs,� represents a tiny drop in an ever-expanding bucket.

According to a 2008 study by Penn’s School of Social Policy and Practice, there are approximately 200,000 to 400,000 ex-offenders in Philadelphia at any given time. Around 40,000 ex-offenders enter Philadelphia every year. Almost all of them struggle to find gainful employment, which, according to this study, contributes to repeat offenses, and a higher rate of recidivism.

Finally, about $6 million will serve as a tourniquet, preventing the further hemorrhaging of jobs related to public safety.

In total, 52 positions — including jobs like community court and probation officers — will avoid cuts as a result of stimulus money. For those keeping track, that amounts to about $115,000 per position.

This possible public sector strike is the sort of thing that’s gonna sit there in the the headlines relatively quietly until it actually happens, and then BOOM it’s gonna be the biggest thing in all of our lives. There will thousands of workers clogging up city streets with protests, the garbage will go uncollected, all sorts of bureaucracies will get backed up.

Will it actually happen? It’s hard to say, with union negotiations, what’s a real position and what’s posturing. But right now, here’s the message coming from Pete Matthews, the president of the biggest city union, D.C. 33:

“We are willing to sit down and negotiate for what we don’t have, but we are not going to negotiate concessions.”

And the response from mayoral spokesman Doug Oliver:

“Anyone who does not recognize a need to make some sacrifice in this economic environment is clearly missing the boat.”

After “losing” his battles over the libraries and the budget, you wonder if this will be the thing Nutter really plays hardball about. But he may not see things that way. He certainly says he doesn’t.

In any case, after some quiet negotiations last year and promises not to negotiate in the press, things are getting a bit heated. The unions are having a demonstration this afternoon at City Hall. We’ll have some on-the-scene coverage for ya.

Summer 2009 (artist’s rendering)

That’s how likely Herman “Pete” Matthews and Cathy Scott of the city’s public sector unions say a strike is (Matthews actually said the probability of a strike is a 7 out of 10, but I’m doing some math here).

Of course, you have to take things like this with a grain of salt; it’s in the union leaders’ interest to a) make the administration nervous, and b) persuade the public that what’s being asked of city workers at this stage is unreasonable. And you do that by making it seem like, holy shit, if the city is going to ask for these kind of concessions, we’ll have no choice but to strike.

In reality, I think, the likelihood of a strike is impossible to determine at this point. Too many things have to happen between now and the end of negotiations — we need to see where the economy is, what happens with the budget in council, where the mayor’s popularity ratings are, how the unions’ message is going over with the public …

All that said, a public sector strike this summer, mid-recession, really has the potential to be unimaginably bad, doesn’t it? No trash pick-up, no DHS, no park or street maintenance, people marching around City Hall every day … Bell Curve keeps making jokes about an approaching dystopic hellscape. Seems like a strike could get us part-way there.

How one Daily News op-ed writer sees Nutter.

You can read about City Paper’s post-game interview with Nutter directly below, and decide for yourself if it’s smart. The following posts from around the Philly poliweb all added something to my understanding of the budget situation:

-In an analogy that somehow likens Mayor Nutter to a drug kingpin without being derogatory, Ben Waxman at it’s Our Money says that, for the first time in his administration, Nutter has declared he wants no more 40 degree days:

Until now, Nutter has been giving us 40 degree days. Despite soaring rhetoric about reform and transparency, he never really backed up his tough talk with action. That seems to have changed with his new budget. He is demanding major sacrifices from city residents, municipal workers, and even elected officials.

And, unlike a 40 degree day, people will have a lot to say about Mayor Nutter’s new budget.

-Over at It’s Our City, Dan Pohlig calls the Mayor out for perpetuating the myth that trash pickup is free, and Alan Tu likens the mayor’s treatment of union leaders to the actions of a playground bully. Stringer Bell and a bully. Nice.

-Chris Brennan breaks down the history of the mayor’s position on casinos, which culminated yesterday in his describing a future Philly utopia highlighted by gaming, and checks in with Council about giving up its cars. Short answer: No.

-Patrick Kerkstra informs that big business likes Nutter’s budget (this is just the text of a press release from the Chamber of Commerce, but still good to know).

-Todd Wolfson, without saying it explicitly, makes the case at YPP that progressives shouldn’t just be happy with seeing services preserved in this budget — they should be angry about the way the public sector unions are being treated.

Did you say something smart about the budget? Put a link in the comments. Isaiah Thompson will be the judge of that.

Although it’s true that people communicated before Twitter, now we only communicate with Twitter. As such, Isaiah Thompson and I will be tweeting the mayor’s budget address this morning from City Hall.

Nutter has already laid out the broad-brush strokes of his plan — small sales tax hike, big property tax hike, moderate cuts to services and big concessions on pensions and benefits from public employees — but we’ll keep you apprised of any surprises, as well as reaction from the crowd, protesters in the balcony, hilarious responses from members of Council, etc. Follow along at twitter.com/citypaper, starting at about 11 a.m.

UPDATE: News editor Doron Taussig has concluded his live Tweet of Nutter’s budget address. Check out all his updates at twitter.com/citypaper. Select highlights below:

- now discussing tax deadbeats. “we are not playing.”

- now talking public employees. besides H-burg, this is the thing that could submarine his whole plan.

- to union heads: “time for leaders to lead, not follow the screaming masses.”

- hey, John street is here! it’s possible he’s sleeping. no, wait, he’s not.

- “there is nothing that can stop us from reaching our destiny.” uh-oh?

UPDATE: CP has received the full text of Nutter’s address. Check out a transcript after the jump.

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The ad SEIU is running.

As the recession churns on, and more people experience more shitty things financially, I find myself wondering where the general public will draw the line in terms of expressing sympathy — especially in those situations, like public union negotiations, where public sympathy matters.

For instance, yesterday morning Philebrity posted an open letter to SEPTA workers (from Kristine Kennedy) who are threatening to strike if contract negotiations don’t go their way, and who are asking — at least at this point — for a six percent raise.

A strike? A six percent raise during what very well might be a depression? Are you serious? My husband was almost laid off last month and instead, must forgo a raise and his usual year-end bonus indefinitely. Many of my friends, several who were unionized workers at the Inquirer, have lost their jobs and may lose their homes.

You get no sympathy from us, SEPTA employees.

OK, so there’s that. Then I find in my inbox a press release from SEIU, saying that they’re launching an ad campaign to pressure the mayor to restore the wages of security guards for homeless shelters, who, as Isaiah Thompson reported recently, saw their pay cut from $16 an hour down (including benefits) down to $9 (with no benefits).

Clearly not the same situation: In one case, people asking for a raise, in the other, people asking that their (not that awesome) salary and benefits package not be cut drastically. But will even this plight strike a chord, coming as it does when everyone in the city is bracing for higher taxes and skimpier services, not to mention dealing with their own economic concerns?

Yesterday afternoon, Ben Waxman at It’s Our Money got his hands on some early copies of Mayor Nutter’s budget proposals, and wrote up a helpful summary of the big points. I’ve been a bit preoccupied with the question of whether Nutter will listen to the “advice” of citizens who went to his budget workshops and called for tax hikes. From Ben’s summary, it seems the answer is “kinda”: the mayor wants to use higher taxes to cover a lot of the deficit, but he doesn’t want to raise wage or business taxes.

I guess a cynic would say this is no compromise at all; Nutter is using the budget workshops as political cover to raise taxes he doesn’t care that much about, and not giving way at all on the taxes he does.

The other way to look at it, though, is that the mayor has indeed made a significant effort to cover the deficit with new revenues, rather than service cuts.

In any event, taxes are just one piece of this; we’re looking at major service cuts, which we’ll have more on in the coming days. Also, and of huge significance, is the fact that the mayor wants to save $125 million over 5 years on “benefits savings” from the public sector unions. If you think Philly is dreary now (sorry, I just looked out my window … so dreary … ) wait until city workers go on strike in the dead of summer.

It’s always exciting, in organizing campaigns, when labor unions/organizing entities single out an individual and make the campaign about his or her alleged indifference to the plight of the worker. Will shame work where guilt and traditional organizing did not?

It’s particularly interesting when the target of the shame is not some corporate bigwig, who’s probably mostly about the money, but the head of an institution like a university or a museum — like Gail Harrity, the CEO of the Art Museum. Harrity is being singled out by Jobs with Justice in its campaign to get security guards at the museum into the Philadelphia Security Officer’s Union (and, presumably, a raise).

They’ve started by trying to get people on their email list to send Mrs. Harrity letters by name, although in my experience, that’s not where these things stop. I’m not going to pretend to know the details of the situation at the art museum, but here’s what Jobs with Justice is telling me, after the jump… (more…)