PhillyDeals: Rendell's part-time gig as "senior adviser" to an investment bank

Ed Rendell, ex-mayor, ex-governor, has joined the investment bank Greenhill & Co. as a "senior adviser."

Greenhill boss Scott Bok wants Rendell to help his New York Stock Exchange-listed investment bank buy highways and other public property from cities and states, lease or sell them to private investors, and pocket the fees.

"He's a nationally respected figure," Bok told me. He wouldn't say what the well-connected Democrat could collect for his part-time gig.

Rendell knows well how broke states and cities are today, and what can be done about it, Bok said: "You can cut services, which isn't popular. You can raise taxes, which isn't popular. Or you can think of assets to monetize."

What's for sale? "Bridges. Toll roads. Lottery systems. Utilities. Ports. Real estate," said Bok. How about state parks? "I don't think they'll go that far."

Greenhill has a personal tie to Rendell and his own past privatization schemes - and not just because Bok has three degrees from Penn, which is also Rendell's alma mater.

As governor, Rendell tried and failed to close a deal to rent the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Citigroup and a couple of Spanish companies, which would have funded repairs to Pennsylvania's crumbling highways and rusty bridges up front, in exchange for collecting and raising tolls for decades to come.

Rendell's adviser on that fight was Robert K. Collins, an investment banker, then at Morgan Stanley, who now runs the infrastructure finance group at Greenhill.

The turnpike plan was mortally wounded by Rendell critics in the General Assembly and the politically connected Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, and died in the credit-market freeze of 2008.

Besides selling public property, Rendell is returning to his old law firm Ballard Spahr L.L.P., writing a column for the Philadelphia Daily News, and, we expect, ranting on cable TV about the Eagles, the Republicans, and people who disagree with him.

State Sen. Anthony Williams, a Philadelphia Democrat whose private-school initiatives and other independent positions have won him past backing from Susquehanna International Group boss Jeff Yass and other business prominenti, has joined Philadelphia City Councilman Bill Green in a proposal to scrap the high and exemption-ridden Pennsylvania corporate income tax. They'd replace it with a commercial activity tax on sales.

The proposed C.A.T. sounds a lot like the enhanced city gross-receipts tax Green failed to carry past Mayor Nutter and Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce, who prefer to tax profits, not sales.

Green and his allies say sales taxes are easier to collect, and to impose on out-of-state companies, which would ease the tax burden on local firms.

Some readers of Wednesday's item about DuPont Co. chief Ellen Kullman and Dow boss Andrew Liveris, who want U.S. aid for science education and manufacturing, aren't too sure this region should want to return to its past as a specialty-factory center.

"My father died of bladder cancer, and I lost a kidney to cancer," after working for decades at the old Crown Cork & Seal Co. labels plant, Nicholas Siravo, of Northeast Philly, told me.

The family blamed the sickness on exposure to aniline dyes. Siravo says Crown paid "a small settlement" for his dad's illness; he lost a lawsuit over his own.

"The chemicals coming out of DuPont and [Dow predecessor] Rohm & Haas are good. They make the clothes you wear and a lot more. But they've also killed people, sometimes after years," Siravo told me. His daughter stayed out of the factories; she's an occupational therapist.

"Kullman and Liveris can promote [U.S.] science education, but what they practice is different," cheerfully retired DuPont R&D veteran Pat Fitzgerald, of Pitman, told me.

"The hiring of science grads, by their company and others, has shifted to places like China and India," he said. So U.S. graduates "wind up on Wall Street, because that's the only place where jobs can be found in this country."