A respectable mayoral legacy

As far as the city's political elite are concerned, Mayor Nutter is already good as gone.

His schedule is chock-a-block with the usual activities of the lame-duck public official. Lots of travel. Lots of rolling over for City Council. Some plugging of personnel holes as staff exit.

With just a year to go before the race to replace him begins in earnest, Nutter has no political heir, virtually no support in Council, and less-than-stellar prospects of winning another elected office in the future.

That's a recipe for political irrelevance.

But here's the thing. On a lot of fronts, the Nutter administration is actually having an awfully good run right now.

Nutter made prudent fiscal management of the city a top priority when he took office. Last month, Standard & Poor's raised the city's bond rating to A-plus - the third hike in recent years - giving Philadelphia its highest rating ever, in the aftermath of a debilitating recession no less.

Nutter made reducing violence the centerpiece of his 2007 campaign. In 2013, the homicide rate was the lowest since 1967, a huge achievement that has not received the attention it deserves.

The mayor has staunchly refused to back off his demands for big pension concessions from the city's labor unions, and gotten criticized for the lack of contracts by his political opponents. This month, the city's white-collar union, AFSCME District Council 47, again rejected its old hard-line president Cathy Scott and elected in her place the more conciliatory Frederick Wright.

And yet little of this is registering with the political class, and likely not with the general public, either.

Somewhere along the line, the narrative on Nutter became set in stone: a decent mayor who fell well short of expectations.

Back in September, when the results of the last Nutter opinion poll were released, just 39 percent of city residents approved of his performance.

Granted, the timing of that poll - amid headlines of the Market Street building collapse and the prospect of city schools not opening - was wretched for Nutter. But it's still safe to assume that Nutter is no longer a particularly popular mayor.

Now that's pretty typical near the end of any executive's second term. But in Philly, Nutter fatigue is a real and serious condition.

There are some good reasons for that, most notably the ongoing schools crisis. Nobody looks good when the schools are on life support, and nobody with kids in the schools cares very much that, technically, Gov. Corbett runs the show and not Nutter.

Even so, given the developments of recent months, I find myself questioning the accuracy of the prevailing Nutter narrative.

At minimum, I'd argue that while broad popularity may be out of reach for Nutter, a respectable legacy is not.

Already he has locked in a more ethical climate in City Hall and dramatically improved financial stability. And despite the rough rollouts, the modernized property assessment system and new zoning code, though politically excruciating, were crucial reforms that should help spur development for decades.

Given these achievements and other recent developments, more genuine legacy achievements seem plausibly within reach.

Nutter and Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey have appropriately refrained from taking too many victory laps on the homicide reduction. It's obviously the work of an entire system, not just two men. And one good year does not necessarily foretell a long-term decline in violence. "Their focus is on now and the future," says Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald. "That's just how they roll."

Even so, the 2013 drop in homicides is a momentous development in a city where violence ranks among the top worries of its residents. If Nutter, the police, and the justice system can build on those gains over the next two years, the mayor could leave office credibly claiming to have done what no other Philadelphia mayor has done.

The election of Wright as DC47 president, meanwhile, strongly suggests that a contract with at least that union could be in the offing relatively soon. If that agreement includes a good chunk of the pension concessions Nutter has always demanded, he can also argue that he has done more than his predecessors to tame the pension beast.

That's doubly true if the administration succeeds in its bid to sell off the Philadelphia Gas Works, as the proceeds of that sale would be sunk into the pension fund. (This would require Council approval and is far from a sure thing.)

These are all pretty big deals. Asked why some of these achievements were coming now, McDonald said the city and administration were getting past the impact of the recession. Also, "in some cases, it just takes time."