Another job for Ethics Board's Glazer?

Since Richard Glazer became chairman of a revamped city Ethics Board in 2006, the agency has been impossible for the city's Democratic power structure to ignore.

Enforcing the city's campaign-finance laws, the agency has collected fines from political action committees controlled by leading political figures, including former Gov. Ed Rendell, Democratic Party Chairman Bob Brady, and close to half of City Council.

It spent more than a year tracing the source of scurrilous fliers in the 2007 mayoral campaign, going into court several times, before IBEW Local 98, the electricians union run by John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty, admitted responsibility.

And it caught Marge Tartaglione's daughter Renee running the affairs of the 19th Ward Democrats while her ward-leader husband was in prison - a violation that cost Renee her job and contributed to Marge's defeat after 36 years as a city commissioner.

But Mayor Nutter says he never got a single request from anyone to take Glazer off the board - a step he took last week, privately informing the 69-year-old attorney by telephone that he was nominating someone to take his place on the ethics panel.

"No. No, no, no, no, no. No one's ever talked to me about . . . I mean, I make the decision on which names to send up or whether to try to extend someone's term," the mayor told us Thursday, the day after Glazer made the mayor's decision public.

As a city councilman, Nutter was the main force behind creation of an independent Ethics Board, approved in a public referendum in 2005. He said he had no significant disagreements with anything the board had done under Glazer's leadership.

"I have a tremendous amount of respect and admiration for him," Nutter said. So much, in fact, that he's got Glazer in mind for an unspecified future job - maybe, more than one.

"There are any number of other important things which Richard Glazer can do," Nutter said. "You'll hear more about that in the future."

- Bob Warner

Council honored Robert N.C. Nix III on Thursday for serving more than 25 years on the Fairmount Park Commission. Nix, however, said the resolution wasn't enough.

"If you think about it, there's a Nix building on Ninth and Market named after my grandfather," he joked, referring to the federal building there.

Nix then launched into an extended roast of himself, describing how his friends thought he could be properly honored. Mayor Nutter's suggestion, he said, was to name a recycling and composting facility for him.

We would like to thank Nix for adding some much needed humor to a normally somnolent portion of the Council meeting. - Troy Graham