Workforce development: It doesn't sound sexy.

So maybe that's why Gov. Corbett's cuts to Philadelphia's workforce development system have went unnoticed by many. Critics of the Corbett administration say they'll have a huge impact even though few are watching.

Read about it in our Daily News article below. And check out the WHYY reports on the policy changes to state-funded jobs programs, as well as the impact of cuts. We partnered with the station for these two stories.

The state wants unemployed people to get jobs. But does it care if the jobs are dead-ends?

For the past year, the Corbett administration has quietly cut funding for Pennsylvania’s jobs programs. It’s also been de-emphasizing training and education. Critics say this is not a recipe for success.

Philadelphia’s jobs programs, which provide services like literacy classes, job training and resume coaching, have lost about 50 percent of their funding due to state cuts and the loss of federal stimulus dollars. The state offers the programs to welfare recipients and other members of the public to improve their chances of finding employment.

Community Legal Services attorney Michael Froehlich said the cuts will force more people into dead-end work. He argues that people who lack training certifications or degrees are more likely to wind up in minimum-wage, unstable jobs.

Continue reading the article.

Will the city soon reap millions in voluntary payments from nonprofits?

Currently, many nonprofits are exempt from paying property taxes. But they used to chip in anyway. In 1995, the city took in more than $9 million annually from voluntary "payments in lieu of taxes," or PILOTs. But then a 1997 state law made it more difficult for the city to negotiate PILOTs, and in 2011, the city received only $383,700 from the agreements.

A state Supreme Court ruling just came down that changes all that, though, and legal experts say that PILOTs are going to make a comeback. In today's podcast, WHYY producer Elisabeth Perez-Luna and I discuss the major change.

Check out the It's Our Money podcast.

Today, the City Council budget hearing for the school district starts at 10 a.m. Given what’s at stake and the complexity of the changes the district is proposing, by our reckoning, the hearing should end ... sometime next month.

The district recently announced a massive restructuring plan that will close schools, create “achievement networks,” push more students into charters, and rely on major concessions from the unions to get $156 million in savings, while coping with a deficit of more than $200 million for next year. Any one of these is worth at least a day of questioning. But the main “ask” of the Council during the hearings is $94 million more from the city.

Members of Council should have a long list of questions about the district’s plans, and why they are more likely to succeed than plans in the past. Here are some of the key questions that should be addressed:

Why does the school district care about AVI? Both school leaders and the mayor have said that the schools need $94 million extra from the Actual Value Initiative — the plan to convert the property-tax system based on new reassessed values. But that’s not true. What the schools need is $94 million. Whether it comes from AVI shouldn’t matter from the schools’ standpoint.

How will the district’s restructuring plan save money? The district wants to simultaneously balance the budget and wholly restructure — some say blow up — the district to ultimately provide a better education for kids. But it’s worth asking whether the district should consider those two goals separately.

The massive restructuring includes aims to decentralize a massive bureaucracy, by sending a whopping 40 percent of all students to charter schools by 2017, as well as creating “achievement networks,” which are groups of 20 to 30 schools run by nonprofits.

According to the district’s blueprint plan, it will save $560 million over the next five years by closing dozens of schools, winning union concessions, reducing the per-student payment to charter schools and revamping custodial services, among other things. But the achievement networks in and of themselves won’t save money.

More charters? Really? We are confused by the district’s math when considering its plan to push more students into charters. The per-pupil allocation for each student that moves from a district-run school to a charter moves out of the district budget, and the state no longer reimburses the district for this. How will this affect future deficits of the district? And how will the plan to reduce the money going to charter affect education?

Further, the state is about to create a charter-authorizing department that will move oversight of charters to the state. This goes well beyond decentralization — it cedes most of the system to a state bureaucracy.

Speaking of the state ... In recent years, the state has reduced its contribution to the schools, while the city has increased what it gives. The state takeover in 2001 provided many advantages, mostly in the form of increased funding. Now, 11 years later, it’s harder to see what the benefits are. In fact, the district’s recent proposals are in line with the state’s idea of reform. The state should be stepping up to the plate to finance it.

This editorial originally appeared in the Daily News.

Today, the Daily News Editorial Board opines about taxpayers paying for a private business' utilities for several years, as "It's Our Money" reported Thursday. 

Their take? That perhaps the City Controller should have caught this "outrage." The board also slams the office for doing an audit for fiscal year 2008-09; the office says it's hustling to complete a backlog of audits and will be up-to-date soon.

Read it yourself (and FYI, the editorial on Water Works begins halfway down the page).

Are PILOTs making a comeback?

Nicholas Cafardi, a charity-law expert at Duquesne University’s Law School, sure thinks so. He says that thanks to a new state Supreme Court ruling, "PILOTs are back."

PILOTs, for any non-wonks who are reading, are voluntary "payments in lieu of taxes" made by nonprofits to cities like Philadelphia. Long, long ago, in the nineties, local nonprofits contributed millions in PILOTs to the city. They likely did this to prevent the city from challenging their tax-exempt status.

But then a 1997 state law largely took away the city's hammer in these negotiations, and PILOTs dried up. Just a couple months ago, we wrote about how PILOTs have dwindled. Now, legal experts say that last week's court ruling changes all that. Check out our Daily News story on the ruling:

Watch out, Penn.

Armed with a new state Supreme Court ruling, the city is planning to review the tax-exempt status of nonprofits, in hopes of persuading them to voluntarily cough up some dough.

Several institutions, like the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas Jefferson University and Drexel University, pay little or nothing in property taxes because they’re nonprofits.

But before the state passed Act 55 in 1997, many nonprofits paid the city “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOTs. Christine Bak, an attorney in the city’s Law Department, says Act 55 stripped away the city’s power in negotiating PILOTs. The law spelled out what nonprofits must do to qualify as a charity, effectively making it easier to be qualified as tax-exempt. Since the city could no longer threaten to sue to take away their tax-exempt status, it couldn’t twist their arm into paying the voluntary PILOTs, either. 

Continue reading the article.

Last month, we reported that Philadelphia pays the utility bills for some lucky non-profits. Now, as it turns out, the city has picked up the tab for one business too. You can listen to our WHYY story about this, or read about it in our Daily News article below:

When “It’s Our Money” started asking questions in March, officials insisted that the city doesn’t pay utility bills for Water Works Restaurant & Lounge, a private business owned by the politically-connected Michael Karloutsos.

The high-end eatery leases space in a historic city-owned building near the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It has crystal chandeliers, $39 dinner entrées, and an outdoor deck with a stunning view of the Schuylkill River.

Why would the fancy place need taxpayers to cover its bills? Robert Allen, Parks & Recreation’s property and concessions management director, initially said the city wasn’t and first deputy commissioner Mark Focht said he didn’t “know of any facilities in Parks & Recreation’s system where the city is paying utilities for for-profits.”

But, after probing by “It’s Our Money,” the city has acknowledged that taxpayers have footed the hefty bill for Water Works Restaurant for the majority of its six-year existence and the Nutter administration has launched an investigation.

Continue reading the article.

Behind the charming boutiques of Main Street in Manayunk sits a crude shell of a building. The property, which runs along the Manayunk Canal on a strip of land called Venice Island, is what’s left of a 19th-century textile mill. It’s basically four jagged, graffiti-covered walls with no roof and nothing inside — as if someone had started demolishing from the top and worked down, but never finished.

“It’s pretty gruesome,” says Mike Yanofsky, who works on Main Street and was taking an afternoon stroll along the canal’s boardwalk when we caught up with him.

He noted the nearby construction of a new Venice Island recreation-and-performing-arts center and wondered, shouldn’t something be done about this eyesore?

He’s not the only one concerned. Kevin Smith, president of the Manayunk Neighborhood Council, says that although the eyesore is often “out of sight, out of mind,” the undeveloped land surely is not conducive to Venice Island’s $46 million revitalization, which includes the recreation center and an underground stormwater-management basin.

Jane Lipton, executive director of the Manayunk Development Corp., says the site is not only ugly but dangerous, because kids have found a way to get inside. They climb on the walls and skateboard on the vast, open site.

That’s not a new development: Dan Diamicis, who grew up in Manayunk, used to hang out at the mill before it was just a few walls, when it was still a rotting building. He said kids called the property “Tetanus Shot” because of all the rusted nails and building parts lying around.

“Now, it’s just like a wasteland,” Diamicis said.

Help Desk learned that Licenses & Inspection declared the old mill “imminently dangerous” back in 2005 and told the owners it had to be demolished — which is how it ended up as just a bunch of crumbling, graffitied walls. Was the demolition a botched job? And if so, why didn’t L&I do anything about it? We got some answers.

KINDA SORTA IMMINENTLY DANGEROUS: When a property is considered “imminently dangerous,” that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole structure is doomed, says L&I spokeswoman Maura Kennedy. L&I sends out a notice specifying which parts of the building must be demolished.

What was imminently dangerous in the mill’s case? According to the 2005 violation notice, it was the “stone foundation wall thru out the building.”

That’s the “lazy way to write it,” says Kennedy. (There have been major management changes at L&I under the Nutter administration.) It would be more thorough to detail exactly which walls have to be demolished.

Kennedy says L&I inspected the site in 2010 and cited the current owners, Waterford Development Associates LP, for high weeds and graffiti. The remaining walls are stable and not considered imminently dangerous, Kennedy says.

LITIGATION HIT THE WALL: OK, so the walls aren’t about to fall down. But they’re still ugly, right? Why isn’t the property owner doing anything about it? We called Dennis Maloomian, CEO of Realen Properties, which owns Waterford Development.

Here’s his short answer: If you own an undeveloped site, you’re required to keep it secure. Keeping up the walls was the easiest way to do this, Maloomian says.

He says his company tries to keep up with the graffitists by painting over the vandalism. But his attempts are often futile.

“All we do is give the graffiti folks a clean slate,” Maloomian says.

There’s a longer answer, too. Realen Properties has big plans for the Venice Island site. You can see the mockups for the proposed luxury residential property on the company’s website. But the Manayunk Neighborhood Council has been fighting Maloomian’s plans for more than a decade now, saying that there are safety concerns with the island and that the development would be visually disruptive.

Currently, the fate of the partially demolished site lies in the court system’s hands.

Maloomian isn’t going to make any moves on the property until he knows what he’s allowed to do with it. That means, for now, the ugly walls will remain. But there’s hope yet.

Kay Sykora, director of the Schuylkill Project at the Manayunk Development Corp., is leading an effort to make the site “feel better.” Her original plan was to work with the Mural Arts Program and get a mural on the site. Sykora says Maloomian was open to this idea. But now, she says it doesn’t seem that those plans will pan out. She’s looking into other options.

Can’t get answers about city services? We can help. Reach us at howl@phillynews.com, 215-854-5855 or on Twitter @phillyhowl. More columns at philly.com/cityhowl.

Last week a City Council committee considered legislation that would require the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, which handles parking-ticket appeals, to allow citizens to fight tickets online or by phone.

Right now, for most of us, fighting an unfair parking ticket means taking a day off work and spending it in a waiting room — or else just deciding,“screw it, it’s not worth it” and paying up.

On this week's It's Our Money podcast, Doron Taussig quizzes Juliana Reyes about the scene on an average day in the BAA waiting room -- including the difficult choice people face when they have to go to the bathroom.

We also break down the arguments for and against holding parking ticket appeals online or by phone.

Yesterday a City Council committee considered legislation that would require the Bureau of Administrative Adjudication, which handles parking-ticket appeals, to allow citizens to fight tickets online or by phone. Shouldn’t these options have been available, like, yesterday?

Especially since for most of us, fighting an unfair parking ticket means taking a day off work and spending it in a waiting room — or else just deciding,“screw it, it’s not worth it” and paying up.

Concerned BAA administrators fear that these changes would lead to a flood of appeals and that face-to-face conversations are more “satisfying” for members of the public.

It may be true that the number of contested tickets would increase with electronic and phone hearings. But it seems just as likely that more time-intensive in-person appeals would decrease (though they’ll still be available), freeing up staff time. And why not let the public decide which kind of appeal “satisfies” us more?

More to the point, quality customer service means making things easier for the customer by adapting the way you do business. The city ought to adopt a more customer-service-friendly attitude. It’s ridiculous that in 2012, Philadelphians can’t use the Internet or the telephone to communicate with their government.

This editorial originally appeared in the Daily News.