I've been recovering from my marathon live-blogging sessions at the International Economic Development Council's "Celebrating 40 Years of Economic Development" event on Monday and Tuesday. It's given me time to go through a lot of my favorite blogs and some new ones that I hadn't seen before. I realized that I've gotten away from one of the things that I think a good blog does - provide links to other interesting things on the internet so that the blog's users don't have to do it themselves.
And trust me. There's plenty of good information being generated about pretty much every Philadelphia issue you can imagine.
So let's get started.
One of my old favorites, Young Philly Politics, uses its own cyber bully pulpit to take Councilman Darrell Clarke to task for his alleged involvement in getting a political rival's vacant lot cleaning contract terminated. You may remember that I wrote about this when the Inquirer first did this story. YPP's Dan U-A shares the outrage of City Paper columnist Bruce Schimmel and encourages the media "to keep hammering away at Clarke and the Mayor, and [get] some answers." As a fairly new member of "the media" my investigative skills aren't quite as polished as some of the good folks at the Daily News, but if anyone has any tips for me, feel free to share.
Staying with YPP for a moment, contributor CharlieNJ uses a New York Times piece on Seattle's amazing transformation as a leader in recycling to point out, once again, the sad state of Philadelphia's recycling rate. Where Seattle seems to collect, nay, mandate that just about everything made out of, um, matter be recycled, Philadelphia recycles just 5% of its waste stream. In fact, I think I cause more environmental damage driving my plastics and cardboard to a recycling drop off site than I prevent by recycling them.
It's tough to find anyone who has ever spoken on the record to explain why this hasn't happened. Most explanations come in the comments sections of stories about recycling and are some anonymously written variation of "John Street and [insert city official's name here] don't care about recycling." In a 2005 Philadelphia Weekly article, Streets Commissioner Clarena Tolson attempts to explain it by placing the blame back on you and me:
But Tolson insists improving residential recycling rates is an epic task.
"In some ways our citizens haven't embraced recycling, and they haven't embraced enforcement," she says. "We need to reproduce some of the public awareness efforts done in the past and promote them more consistently."
She also blames high start-up costs (distributing new bins, buying new trucks, paying the waste processors) and seems to ignore the dollar figures that get tossed around as the NET benefit of more recycling.
Next item, please.
Phil Goldsmith, former managing director, joins the chorus of folks who think that Jannie Blackwell is, to put it nicely, using "councilmanic privilege" improperly in her opposition to relocating the Youth Study Center. To his credit, he doesn't use the phrase "holding the city hostage." Reading this column led me to find Phil's blog, where his latest entry is a supplement to his column advocating for non-partisan elections. Apparently, New York has been talking about such a change for a few years - and they've actually elected mayors from both major parties!
Next item, please.
Heard in the Hall, the much more active predecessor to Mayorpalooza, reminds us that while there's little doubt left in any of this year's city elections, some Council candidates are still floating interesting ideas. The promise to "look into" candidate Green IV's budget plan (please, don't fall asleep) and I look forward to seeing their analysis. Most promising seems to be Green's use of the oft-mentioned-but-never-implemented idea of tying his "Zero Based Budgeting Model to service benchmarks" and "tying costs to programs" so that "taxpayers can more accurately evaluate the value and the need of a program." In other words, we'd finally know exactly how much it costs (in employee wages and benefits, materials, equipment etc.) to operate a library or fill a pothole. One of these days someone will actually make this happen. Michael Nutter seems to want to go in this direction (see page 4).
Next item, please.
I have little to add to the discussion of City Council's attempt to ban trans fats from the city so I'll defer to D-Mac. It seems to me, that a city that once had a "bowling alley tax," which effectively closed all of the city's bowling alleys, would realize that if you want to get rid of something, tax the crap out of it (cf. wage tax, effect on jobs).
Great Expectations has been doing the yeoman's work of, well, raising expectations. On Monday, they invited zoning expert Matt Blanchard to field questions about the work of the Zoning Code Commission. His answer to the guy who basically said "why do we even need zoning?" is especially good. Short version - you don't like zoning? Move to Houston where you can live next door to a rendering plant.
Sticking with Great Expectations, Tom Ferrick took a stab at ranking, from best to worst, the city's last seven mayors. His best - Ed Rendell. That's no surprise since chronological proximity to the present time often influences such rankings (IMDB's second best movie on its top 250 is Shawshank Redemption). His worst - Frank Rizzo. Mr. Ferrick, consider your South Philadelphia privileges revoked. He doesn't include Joe Clark who I think needs to be in there just to round out the post-charter reform group of mayors. What's your ranking? I'll share mine in the comments. Another interesting note, which Ferrick himself points out, is that one of the only two responses he got to this post comes from noted bibliophile, St. Rep. Mark Cohen.
The Metro's Metropolis blog, the successor to Best of Philly winner "Fight For Room 215," offers a little commentary on yesterday's made-for-the-media event featuring Sen. Bob Casey, Rep. Allyson Schwartz and Michael Nutter. They ask the most important point about an event that really didn't generate any news aside from putting these three people in the same place: "Let's see how their cooperation stops people from shooting each other throughout the city."
Finally, Brett Mandel at Philadelphia Forward also wants to remind you that (1) there's an election on November 6th (2) there are two candidates and (3) they've both been captured and places in small prison cells reminiscent of the Phantom Zone from Superman II. The winner of the election will be freed from Brett's cell and then quickly reimprisoned (seriously? that's not a word?) in the aforementioned Room 215.
Ok... folks, so rank the mayors! And if you do it here, please do it on Ferrick's post too, since I basically ganked his idea.
Comments (2)
Interesting list.... I was around but TOO young to understand the Joe Clark show. :-)
Posted by Jasper Zeigler Jr | October 11, 2007 8:58 AM
Dan ,
You will never attain a true opinion or an accurate building of their characters or their worth. Bottom-line Dan. Its politics you are dealing with.
Enjoying the Fall weather :-)
Posted by Jasper Zeigler Jr | October 11, 2007 11:16 AM