Will Council have a Gang of 6?

CITY COUNCIL freshmen, start your engines.

Four years ago, new members Maria Quinones-Sanchez, Bill Green and Curtis Jones Jr. changed the game by forming an alliance and taking charge on important issues. Now all eyes are on six newbies - the largest freshman class since 1992 - who were sworn in yesterday at the Academy of Music.

"The motto [used to be] sit back and be quiet for your first term and get endorsed by the party for another term," said Zack Stalberg, president of political watchdog group Committee of Seventy. "The freshman three created a different kind of model in which performance matters."

Jones, Green and Sanchez developed a close relationship, due in part to an eight-month-long Council-orientation training session with former city housing director Thomas Massaro. They got to know each other's families and even vacationed together.

Early on in Council, the three stuck together, often co-sponsoring legislation. Now they operate independently, and when they disagree, they have honest, open discussions about it, they said.

But a similar bond, while not impossible, may be less likely with the six new members: Mark Squilla, Kenyatta Johnson, Bobby Henon, Cindy Bass, David Oh and Denny O'Brien, who all hail from varying political camps and backgrounds.

Massaro said that these freshmen are not as "tightly bonded" as the previous group, and that's partly because many of the members were in the midst of competitive elections during the informal Council training sessions.

He said that the difference was that this pre-election training session included some candidates who were running against the winners.

A potential six-member freshman coalition is endangered by a number of things, Stalberg said.

"The Council president may want to build a coalition of nine; the mayor will try to build a coalition of at least nine," he said. "There's several different tensions. It will be somewhat different with a larger group of freshmen. They all have competing political interests, political pressures. You have two former [state] representatives; some are a part of the [John Dougherty] camp . . . "

But if the new members were able to pull it off, they would make for a fairly powerful force.

"They are six people," Green said. "If they come in with the kind of friendship we were able to build in eight months - they would have a working bloc."

All three of the former freshmen members were angling for leadership posts. Jones snagged the seat for majority leader. Green and Sanchez sponsored legislation to significantly change the city's business-tax structure. Green introduced a bill to eliminate the Deferred Retirement Option Plan for elected officials and Council approved a measure March 2010.

The new members say that they have a good working relationship with each other and that they're ready to make their mark. They don't think that political ties will have much of an influence.

"I don't think outside ties play a role one way or another," said Squilla. "Everyone has ties, but as individuals we have the ability to work together and come up with a consensus."