Archive: March, 2009
Jeff Shields
Union plumbers and Philadelphia firefighters yesterday successfully deflected a change in the city’s plumbing code that would allow plastic PVC pipe to be widely used in construction, a cost-saving measure favored by developers and low-income housing advocates.
Council’s Committee on Licenses and Inspections on Wednesday continued a hearing on Darrell L. Clarke’s bill to allow the use of PVC pipe in all residential construction. Currently the pipe can only be used in structures of three stories or less with four units or less.
The Nutter administration backed the bill, saying Philadelphia’s construction costs are driven up by requiring metal pipes. But at least 150 plumbers filled Council Chambers to argue that the cast iron, brass or copper pipes were safer, and they were backed by the city’s firefighters, who said the chemicals emitted by the PVC pipes in a fire would pose a health threat to them.
Committee chair Maria Quiñones Sánchez adjourned the hearing with the understanding that all sides would work on a compromise.
Jeff Shields
A week before the March 9 deadline, City Council had only 11 applications to fill nine seats on the new Commission of Parks and Recreation. They received 207.
The board is to have a prominent role in creating rules and regulations for a new city agency resulting from the merging of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation, effective July 1.
On Wednesday morning, Council’s Committee on Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs began interviewing the first 39 candidates in an open session. Council is to submit between 18 and 25 nominees to Mayor Nutter, who will appoint nine members to the 15-member board, the other six positions filled by department heads.
Some familiar names on the list include Vincent Fenerty, executive director of the Philadelphia Parking Authority; Joseph Manko and Debra Wolf Goldstein, current Fairmount Park commissioners; Harris Steinberg, executive director of Penn-Praxis, an adjunct of Penn’s design school; and David Thornburgh, executive director of Penn’s Fels Institute of Government and son of former governor Dick Thornburgh.
Jennifer Lin
The city's two slots licensees -- Foxwoods and SugarHouse -- will meet on April 8 in Harrisburg to give the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board status reports on their projects.
It's not a hearing but a public meeting to "provide full and complet update on the status of their projects," said the gaming board Wednesday. Board Chair Mary DiGiacomo Colins said representatives of HSP Gaming (SugarHouse) and Philadelphia Entertainment and Development Partners (Foxwoods) will be given the opportunity to not only make a presentation but also answer questions from the Board.
"Many qusetions have been raised as to why they have not yet started construction even two years after the licenses were granted," Colins said. "The Board wants to know what the obstacles are and what the operators plan on doing to overcome these and deliver their projects to Pennsylvania."
Colins said the board wants information on permits as well as plans for construction.
Jeff Shields
CORRECTION from earlier post: Councilman Brian J. O'Neill is not enrolled in DROP. Councilman Frank Rizzo is.
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Mayor Nutter will ask Council members to disqualify themselves and other elected officials from the controversial DROP pension plan, sources said today.
Nutter is notifying Council this afternoon that he will introduce a bill in Council Thursday, along with his budget, would forbid elected officials from collecting a lump-sum pension payment upon retirement under the Deferred Retirement Option Plan.
Elected officials’ participation in DROP does not represent a tremendous cost savings — the entire DROP program was once estimated to cost $7 million annually, and elected officials are a small fraction of that — but Nutter has cited it as hot-button issue often brought up by city residents.
The program, whose costs been in dispute for the 10 years of its existence, allows city employees to declare a retirement date up to four years in the future. Their pension level is frozen at that time, and they then begin amassing pension payments while still working and collect a lump sum when they retire. The city recoups some of that money on the back end in pension payments are less than what they would have been if the employee stayed with the city and amassed further pension credit.
Nutter's bill would not eliminate the DROP program for regular workers, though Nutter has commissioned a study to determine DROP's impact on retirement patterns and its real cost to the city.
Ten elected officials are currently in drop, including Council President Anna C. Verna, Majority Leader Marian B. Tasco, Minority Whip Frank Rizzo and council members Frank DiCicco, Jack Kelly, and Donna Miller. Register of Wills Ronald Donatucci, District Attorney Lynne Abraham, Sheriff John Green and Clerk of Quarter Sessions Vivian Miller.
The bill apparently would exclude recently elected officials, including Mayor Nutter from the program, and would require Council members currently eligible for DROP to decide by year's end, sources said.
Nutter's bill would echo a similar measure introduced by Councilman Bill Green last year, but apparently would not grandfather in as many current elected officials. It would not prevent the much-criticized legal right of an elected official to collect a DROP payment, win reelection, then retire for a day before their next term and continue to serve. City Councilwoman Joan Krajewski and City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione collected their DROP payments last January and returned for another term.
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Marcia Gelbart
If local elected officials all give back their city-issued cars, it probably won't go a long way toward reducing the city's five-year, $1 billion budget hole.
But Mayor Nutter is asking them anyway.
The mayor has been making a series of calls to ask City Council members and most other independently elected officials to use their own cars while on the job. Though it is a largely symbolic move, it will enable Nutter to say, once again, that he heard the pleas of the public about how the city spends its money.
"I don't know he can mandate it," Nutter spokesman Doug Oliver said. "But he hopes that those who are willing to would follow our lead."
Marcia Gelbart
Few Philadelphians can truly understand what Vince Fumo is going through. Here is one who can.
"I hope somebody realizes all the good this man did. He did more good than any political person in the history of Philadelphia. It's just a shame," former City Councilman Leland Beloff said.
Charged in 1986 with conspiring to shake down local developer Willard G. Rouse 3d for $1 million, Beloff served five years of a 10-year prison sentence.
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Patrick Kerkstra
The Committe of Seventy has just called for the elimination of six elected city government positions - the Sheriff, the Clerk of Quarter Sessions, the Register of Willis and the three City Commissioners - a group of little-known but politically important public servants who head offices that perform relatively mundane municipal tasks, such as organizing elections, and processing court documents and wills.
The non-partisan organization makes its case in a 56 page report titled "Needless Jobs." The header pretty welll sums up Seventy's view: that there is no need to have elected officials performing these functions, that the jobs they perform can be easily transferred to other city units, and that doing so will save money and reduce patronage.
See the report below.
Needless Jobs
Jeff Shields
City Council President Anna Verna, whose Second Councilmanic District overlaps with Vince Fumo's First Senatorial District in South and Southwest Philadelphia, said the city's doesn't realize what it's missing without Fumo in Harrisburg to fight for city funding.
"Let me tell you, I think we’re going to miss him something terrible in Harrisburg," said Verna, who most recently worked closely with Fumo to find a home for a new state-built produce terminal in the Southwest.
Verna, who came to know Fumo after her election to City Council in 1975, said Fumo's particular talent for bringing home city funding -- from a state legislature with little sympathy for Philadelphia -- would have come in handy during a budget crisis.
"The average person may not know or realize that," she said. "He would have been up there fighting for every penny.... It’s a shame that he’s not there now – we could sure use a Vince Fumo now."
Marcia Gelbart
Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission Chairman Mitchell Rubin - Ruth Arnao's husband and close friend to Vince Fumo - is awaiting the 2 p.m. bail hearing.
"I'm disappointed," Rubin said. "Listen, my wife is a good person. She has worked hard her whole life. Other than that, there is nothing to say."
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Marcia Gelbart
Longtime Fumo friend Rosanne Pauciello, Democratic leader of Ward 39A, was distressed and saddened by the news.
"I am devastated, I am devastated," she said in a phone interview about an hour after the verdict was issued. "The senator worked so hard… And Ruthie (Arnao) was an angel in my life," she said, recounting how Arnao stood at her sister's side when she was ill in 2001.
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