The Next Mayor

One of the good things about operating this website and blog is that sometimes, people send me interesting things. Yesterday was one of those times and from that.

By now you might know that we've been trying to keep track of the appointments made to the new administration, but we really didn't have a handle on how the administration was organized.

That picture has become a whole lot clearer. According to this flow chart (.pdf file) obtained by The Next Mayor, everyone has a distinct place in the hierarchy and we can see who reports directly to the mayor.

Page 1 shows how authority is distributed among many of the traditional, charter-mandated positions and deputy mayors. You'll notice that the chart specifically designates many of these positions with their dual, deputy mayor/other position, titles. This is a way that the Nutter administration is able to pay the top dollar commanded by the talent which it has recruited without running afoul of charter-mandated pay ceilings.

According to the chart, it seems that twelve positions report directly to the mayor. I may be reading it wrong, but it would also seem that five of those positions (four of the deputy mayors and the Chief Information Officer) also report to the Managing Director. According to the legend in the lower left corner of page 1, the Police and Fire Commissioners also report directly to the mayor.

Off to the right side of the chart, you notice the Chief of Staff who reports directly to the Mayor. The several offices that report to the Chief of Staff are given in greater detail on page 2. The chart also includes several agencies or offices that are italicized which represent independent entities that aren't directly controlled by the mayor. However, in keeping with the idea of coordinating efforts with these offices and agencies, the administration has made certain positions responsible for communicating with them.

Page two is where it gets interesting. The Chief of Staff has two deputy chiefs of staff who divide up day-to-day oversight of the several "Offices of...", of which there are ten. Folks who have been worried about the Office of Arts and Culture (and the less vocal environmental community who may have been worried about the Office of Sustainability) should take some solace in the fact that at least those offices are represented on this chart. Though it seems that, for now, the Office of Arts and Culture includes exactly one person - the director.

It seems that most of the positions represented on this flow chart, aside from a couple of the "Offices of" and some lower level staff.

So take some time over the weekend to drink it all in and feel free to comment about what you see (or don't see).

Yesterday in the Inquirer, Harris Steinberg, the executive director of PennPraxis and the guy who led the year-long public planning process for the Central Delaware Advisory Group, praised the appointment of Andy Altman as Mayor Nutter's deputy mayor for planning and economic development AND commerce director.

Steinberg's praise, while he acknowledges Altman as a "veteran planner" is more directed that the decision to combine, in one person, the roles of "physical planning and economic growth." As you can see from the flow chart I referred to in the previous post, and as Steinberg points out, Altman will be in charge of "commerce, zoning, historical, art, housing, licenses and inspections, and more."

It would be easy to defer to Steinberg, who you may remember from our Issues Forum video about the Casinos and Waterfront Development, and agree that this move is indeed a good thing. But it seems to me that accepting that is a bit of a leap of faith and really depends on Mr. Altman's commitment to solid planning and getting the city away from the "economic development at all costs" strategy that it has employed for the past generation or so.

That is a concern shared by at least some other folks who are concerned with city planning and the city's physical development - a term, I've been taught, is very distinct from the city's economic development.

A recent conversation I had with a frequent reader of this blog - and someone whose opinion on the issue of city planning I respect - told me that the planning community has responded to this appointment with some trepidation. Again, the problem is by no means with Mr. Altman. In fact, my source agrees that Altman "is the best" and "a superstar that world" of physical planning and development. He went on to say that "it's amazing that we got him here."

No, the problem is precisely with what Steinberg says was a good idea, combining the role of Commerce Director with this authority over planning. In fact, there are very few examples in other major cities of planning being combined with economic development.

(Sidebar: As I understand it, planning is concerned with the "physical development" of the city: ie the actual buildings that are built, where they are build, where the streets go, where the parks are, how high the buildings are, how far back from the sidewalk they are and what kinds of building uses can go in which locations. Economic development is concerned with bringing in businesses that provide jobs, either by encouraging existing businesses to move here or non-existent businesses to start here.)

Aside from some small cities, Washington D.C. is the only example of a major city that combines planning and economic development. In fact, they have an actual Deputy Mayor of Planning and Economic Development - the exact same position created by Nutter. In most other major cities, the function of Planning takes precedence while economic development has a lesser role.

Planning has long taken a back seat here in Philadelphia as Steinberg points out in his piece:

The mantra was that any development was good development - a sign of both desperation and lack of sophistication. We got away with it because, by charter, city planning in Philadelphia is only advisory to the mayor and council, with no jurisdictional power.

Contrast this to Chicago where "the current 18 [Plan] commission members are appointed by the mayor and must approve, disapprove or defer any proposal by a public body or agency 'to acquire, dispose, or change any real property within the territorial limits of the city' on the basis of whether or not the referral complies with the city's long range planning goals and objectives."

Another example is New York, which has a planning department but no commerce department.

Ultimately, though, the problem with this position is that Altman, as a deputy mayor of planning and economic development, should be in charge of "coordinating" the functions of the various departments that report to him. However, since he is also the Commerce Director, he's in charge of one of those very departments.

It may have been better if a separate person had been given the Commerce Director job and Altman could focus on keeping the lines of communication between planning and commerce. Since Nutter is in the process of separating the Commerce Director and City Representative positions into two separate positions, Commerce would no longer even be a charter-mandated cabinet position. The charter specifically says the City Representative shall be on the cabinet. Altman could still serve as Deputy Mayor and on the cabinet without having to be the Commerce Director.

What happens when an economic development opportunity comes along that could bring thousands of jobs to the city but the business wants to build in a place where its presence doesn't fit with the fabric of the neighborhood or the long range plan for that area? Which part of Altman's dual role will take precedence?

Steinberg seems to think it'll be the "planning part." Other planners, as I've heard in some of my conversations, are taking a wait-and-see approach. Regardless of how this plays out, with the rewriting of the zoning code, the development of new comprehensive city plan, the constant tension between new building and historical preservation, and the recent unveiling of a new plan for the central Delaware waterfront, Altman is going to have his hands full.

My post from Friday about the new position of Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic development generated a good amount of discussion in the comments but also resulted in some really good email responses.

After the jump, I'll share one from reader Evan who took issue with my use of Chicago as a comparison city and the exchange that followed as I responded to him.

Click "Continue Reading" to read the whole thing. Feel free to keep the discussion going in the comments.

And by light posting, I basically mean no posting. Today and tomorrow I'll be preparing for our Super Tuesday web coverage.

I encourage you to visit whyy.org for all of your Election 2008 coverage. Tomorrow night we'll be focusing with Fox 29 and Temple University to provide a truly unique Super Tuesday experience.

On WHYY 91FM, we'll be carrying NPR's wall-to-wall coverage of the results from Super Tuesday starting at 8pm when the first polls close. Local coverage will be provided by our own reporters in New Jersey and Delaware.

We are partnering with Fox 29 for web coverage starting at 8pm at myfoxphilly.com and whyy.org. Both sites will link to a blog where students from Temple University will be writing about the presidential race from their perspective as young, college students from different backgrounds with different levels of engagement in the race. There will also be a live chat on myfoxphilly.com where users can interact with Fox 29's Bruce Gordon. On whyy.org, you can access up-to-the-minute maps with the results from Super Tuesday contests and get streaming audio from NPR.

And, of course, you may even see some blogging from yours truly.

So check out whyy.org tomorrow night and if you happen to be a New Jersey or Delaware voter (or just really into either the Republican or Democratic contests) feel free to comment on the Super Tuesday blog. I'll be looking for the best comments to promote them as their own posts.

I'll be back tomorrow to chat about city issues, but for tonight, check out what we have going on over at our Super Tuesday blog. Some students from Temple along with Associate Professor of political science Michael Hagen will be joining me to talk about the results as they come in and the race in general.

You can feel free to participate in the excitement by commenting to any post you like. I'll take the best comments and promote them to their own posts. Fox 29 is partnering up with us and linking to this blog so your insightful comment could be seen by several thousand 91 FM listeners and Fox 29 viewers who we'll be sending to the blog.

Go to WHYY's Election 2008 page and click on "Live Blog" to check it out!

(Ok, shameless cross promotion is over!)

To refresh your memory, here is an excerpt from a December 12th blog post:

Leaving aside the obvious point that the endorsement of the mayor-elect of Philadelphia is unlikely to make much difference in the outcome given the lateness of Pennsylvania primary, do you think this was a smart, savvy move?

I figured I'd point that out before someone else did. So now that Pennsylvania's Democratic primary may actually mean something, I'll pose the question again but in a slightly different way. What does Nutter's endorsement of Clinton mean for her chances here in Philadelphia where a huge percentage of the state's Democratic voters live?

Ben Smith of Politico.com wrote a little about the "Pennsylvania Scenario" yesterday, before the results were in:

Then, in the perhaps unlikely scenario that both candidates survive that day — and that the 796 Democratic Party officials who cast independent votes as “superdelegates” don’t flood, en masse, to a perceived front-runner — campaigns come face to face with the Pennsylvania Scenario.

To staffers and reporters worn out by the campaign trail, the Pennsylvania Scenario is a bit of a nightmare. To Pennsylvanians, it’s a dream.

Yes, a dream. Six weeks of Obama and Clinton ads on television. The candidates and their surrogates will visit every diner, barber shop, shopping mall, town square, and nursing home. The term "WaWa" may actually make it into the national consciousness. And, yes, the cheesesteak could make its triumphant return. Is this your dream?

And how about that? Nutter is part of the state's establishment. What a difference a year makes!

It's too bad Nutter threw down so early for Clinton. Imagine the kind of cool stuff he could have gotten out of the eventual winner if he had waited and then - and this is important - backed that person.

So let's catch our breath, get back to Philly's issues and get ready to grill both of those candidates on each and every nuance of those issues. Yes, it may be time again to ask what we can do for our country, but it's also fair to ask what our country can do for our city.

There's a great discussion of everyone's favorite tax - to talk about, at least - the Business Privilege Tax, specifically, the gross receipts portion of the BPT.

YPP's Dan U-A anticipates the debates in council over Councilman Wilson Goode's proposed bill to phase out the gross receipts portion of the BPT. He asks:

Before we make a decision on whether to cut business taxes, we should know how much each business actually pays to the City each year. (As we know from the Vince Fumo property tax fiasco, how much each person pays in property taxes is a public record.) Is a small businessperson actually saving enough money to re-invest in their business, or to hire additional workers? Without having real statistics, how would we know?

So, before we decide to cut business taxes or not, we should know how much every business- from big old Comcast to the smallest person just opening up shop, pays in taxes to the City each year. This may shock you, but under the previous Mayor, the Commerce Department generally refused to provide these numbers. I guess they thought it was their business only. But, with a new Mayor focused on transparency and the like, I am hoping things change.

The debate over the actual cutting of the taxes is going on fast and furiously in the comments to that post, with an appearance by the bill's sponsor, Councilman Wilson Goode.

As part of our last hurrah before we wrap the The Next Mayor project, we're partnering up with the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania to present a series of "Green" ideas from cities throughout the world.

Graduate students at Fels researched a number of initiatives that could easily be replicated here in Philadelphia to help Mayor Nutter achieve his goal of making Philadelphia "the greenest city in the country."

You can get a sneak preview of the op-ed that will be appearing in tomorrow's Daily News and check out the full list of these green ideas.

We thought locally but looked globally. And now we're challenging you to do the same.

Have you heard of any good ideas that are happening in other cities to help lessen the environmental impact of the people in those cities? Do you have any ideas of your own? Feel free to make suggestions in the comments of this blog post. We'll be promoting the best suggestions to their own posts throughout the day on Friday.

We interrupt this blog to talk about some breaking (or recently broken) news.

I'm sure you've read the story about the house that exploded in Queen Village. (Or seen the video) Fortunately, no one was hurt. The couple who owns the house was out at the time and judging from the scene, the houses on either side sustained minor damage. It's absolutely tragic for the owners to have lost everything and I hope they have the support they need to get through this.

Like I said in the title of the post, my wife and I live in a house that abuts the house that is directly across the street from the site of the explosion. When I heard a traffic report shortly after 4 about the closure of 6th and Bainbridge due to an explosion, my first thought was "please don't be my house." I searched frantically for news before finding some links on Philly Blog that led to more information and eased my fears that I'd be returning home to a pile of rubble.

What I did return home to, however, was this:

That's fire hose, originating at what must have been the closest fire hydrant, going over our front fence, wrapping by our tree and then going down the side of our house, through our neighbor's back yard and out to 6th Street. Apparently, my old charcoal grill was in the way so it was cast aside and broken into all of its component parts. Tragic, really. That grill was just two weeks away from retirement.

On the bright side, we did get a free tree watering and, for at least a couple hours, we had nice, serene little pond and fountain in our front yard:

It may be tough to tell, but that's a spray of water from the hose junction and two inches of water on the ground. You can also see where the slats were broken out of our gate in an aborted effort to get the hose through. It's unfortunate that we weren't home. We could have saved everyone, including the poor fire fighter who had to climb that fence, a lot of trouble by being there to open the gate.

Let me be clear. I'm sooo not complaining about any of this. I'm sure the cost to replace the lattice in the gate will be minimal and the water was gone by this morning. Our cat eventually returned from his hiding place after all of the firemen and news helicopters left and he seemed none the worse for wear. And, like I said, my trees got watered! Considering what my poor neighbors to the immediate east across the 6th Street border of Bella Vista and Queen Village returned to last night, I have plenty of reason to be thankful this morning.

It did make for an interesting night and gave me the chance to meet a few very helpful and concerned neighbors.

Clifton Davis, perhaps best well known for his role in a couple of sitcoms from the late 70s and 80s, announced his resignation from his role in "That's My Fourth of July Fireworks" as CEO of Sunoco's Welcome America.

City Representative Melanie Johnson sent out a press release with the news:

“I want to take this opportunity to thank Clifton for his hard work and dedication to Welcome America,” said Mayor Nutter. “I wish him the best of success in his future pursuits.”

“I have truly enjoyed working with my staff and the many leaders of key organizations in the hospitality industry of Philadelphia, and I value the relationships we have built over the years,” Mr. Davis said in a letter to Mayor Nutter. “I feel extremely proud of the two Sunoco Welcome America! Festivals we have had the pleasure of helping to produce.”

I nominate the Haywood Nelson as his replacement.

I've read a ton of articles in every major news outlet about the issue of rewriting the zoning code and the work of the Zoning Code Commission. Several have focused on the players involved - especially the dust up over Sharif Street's appointment to and subsequent dismissal from the commission.

Aside from Plan Philly, which has an entire section that explains what zoning is and why its important, most of the coverage of the Zoning Code Commission hasn't gone to in depth to explain the large issue. So I was pleasantly surprised when my daily Google News search for "Michael Nutter" (you'd think I was stalking the guy) turned up an article in Bryn Mawr Now about one of his appointments to the Commission - Professor Daniela Voith.

Using one of my favorite techniques - comparison to a television, movie or video games - the writer breaks down zoning for the wider audience:

A city's zoning code determines what kinds of buildings can be built where. Anyone who's played the popular computer game SimCity can name three basic zones: residential, commercial, and industrial. SimCity devotees probably understand that placing a nuclear power plant next to a pizza parlor would be bad planning, and that connecting the suburbs to downtown with light rail is good planning.

And, in interviewing one of the actual appointees in depth, rather than just printing her bio from the Nutter press release, this writer provides some insight into the importance of the Zoning Code Commission:

The commission is in its infancy, but one thing Voith is sure of is the need to create smart, fair zoning for the city's future. She points to Houston to illustrate why thoughtful zoning is important.

"It was a well-intended rule that actually eats away at the quality of the urban fabric, and runs counter to what makes older neighborhoods of Philadelphia great."

Nice work, Bryn Mawr Now.

Segways. At least, that's the part that The Economist liked so much that they put it in the headline.

My favorite part - and the emphasis is mine - comes at the end:

Alex Piquero of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice thinks the plan is a good idea, but its success “depends on what the officer is doing on the street”. Community policing and good relations with civilians are essential. Mr Nutter believes his ambitious goals are attainable. He points to New York, where violent crimes have dropped 75% over the past decade. For a city of Philadelphia's size, he reckons, homicides “should be well under 200”.

I've made the point that if we had the same crime rate as NYC, it should be under 100 but it's funny that folks in New York City, the home of John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the "Fighting Federalists," think that you can just pick up New York's crime rate and put it on any city.

I want to thank everyone who responded to our post and became engaged in creating a greener Philadelphia. You can see all of the great suggestions that came in by going back and checking out the comments to that post.

My selection for the best of those suggestions goes to... drum roll...

Alex Doty of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. Here are his suggestions, in their entirety:

The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadephia has a 2008 Agenda for a Bicycle Friendly Philadelphia, which is a series of policy steps that the Nutter Administration and City Council could easily take to promote safer bicycling and encourage more people to get out of their cars and onto bikes for commuting, shopping and recreation.

Read the full 2008 Bicycle Friendly Agenda on the Bicyle Coalition's blog at http://bcgp.blogspot.com/

Have a good weekend, folks!

When I first heard that Marge was joining the police academy, I thought it would be fun and zany, like that movie Spaceballs. But instead it was dark and disturbing. Like that movie -- Police Academy. - Homer Simpson

The big story large news from yesterday was the decision by Mayor Nutter to change the residency requirement for police recruits. Formerly, a potential new police officer needed to live in the city before he or she could even enter the academy. They also needed a Pennsylvania driver's license to apply. Now, they won't need the PA driver's license and they won't have to move into the city until six months after they graduate into the force.

This one always seemed like one of those no-brainers to me but I assumed that since it hadn't yet been done, despite support from City Council and the FOP, that there must be some super complicated process required for the change. Turns out... not so much. According to the Daily News story:

Mayor Nutter yesterday announced that the city has relaxed its residency requirement for wannabe police officers.

The Philadelphia Civil Service Commission granted the waiver, allowing nonresidents to become police recruits.

So all it took was for Nutter to ask for it and the Civil Service Commission to "grant a waiver" and poof... a 50 year tradition goes the way of the dodo. So why the wait? Turns out, as I found out from the Inquirer coverage, the answer - at least for the last 8 years - starts with a J ends with a T and has "ohn Stree" in the middle:

Efforts to relax the requirement have been stymied for years. In 2001, Mayor John F. Street - an ardent opponent of waiving the one-year rule - vetoed legislation approved by Council that would have done away with it.

Why would a mayor stand in the way of a change that could accomplish two very important things - (1) help find the best and brightest people in the country to serve on the police force and (2) give people a reason to move into the city and make it easier for them to do so? All I can think of is that it comes down to politics. (Surprise!)

Bring in a bunch of new folks and it becomes less easy for the party to control them or (horrors) they may actually be Republicans or Independent voters. New residents are the wild card in elections. As the city has shrunk, a big part of the reason may have been that folks became disillusioned with the elected leadership. Rather than stick around to vote that leadership out of office, they voted with their feet. A larger percentage of those who stuck around were folks who could be reliably counted on to support the machine and its candidate. Independent Democrats and folks from the Republican or third parties had fewer and fewer people in their natural bases of power.

Anyway, that's my theory. I welcome anyone else who wants to rabble rouse over what is actually a pretty good step in the right direction.

Mayor Nutter's first budget address to council takes place this morning at 10am.

The rubber, as they say, is hitting the road. The "fun" parts of being a new mayor - hiring rock star staffers with national credentials, shaking hands with folks who lined up for hours, being on ABC News - are coming to a close.

Now we'll get a chance to see how this new administration functions with its most important, if not particularly glamorous, functions - figuring out where to spend our money and how much of it they want.

The Daily News and Inquirer have some decent preview stories, including a tidbit about the parking tax in the Daily News. As one who walks to work and most other places in Center City, that one doesn't really affect me but I'm sure there are many of you out there who will be affected. I don't have much to say about the an increase on the tax on parking fees but feel free to offer your thoughts in the comments.

I'm heading out to City Hall now (by bike) with video camera and tripod in tow. Stay tuned for some video bites and more discussion of the budget later on today.

As we figure out what's going to happen with The Next Mayor and this little blog of ours, you don't have to worry about getting your fix on all of the latest, most-insidery stuff from City Hall.

How insidery? (Did I just make up a new word?)

The folks writing it are actually in City Hall, all day, every day.

Catherine Lucey and Chris Brennan of the Daily News have been doing Philly Clout since, it appears, early January. I just found it via Attytood.

So the day-to-day coverage of politics and all those fun, sometimes zany even, folks in City Hall is in the capable hands of a couple of journalists who have been at this for a long time and do indeed know where the bodies are buried (or at least who buried them).

As for the in depth and, again sometimes zany, coverage of the issues...

We'll have more to say about where that part of The Next Mayor will be going.

As promised, here comes the highlights:

Let me 'splain what you're seeing.

As he opened his address, Mayor Nutter was clearly emotional as he told the story of his first visit to City Council almost 26 years ago. He then quoted from the Athenian pledge, an oath that all citizens of Athens took upon becoming citizens. From there he outlined a number of spending initiatives, goals for recycling, plans to lower wage and business taxes.

In addition to what you've seen, Nutter also referred to the impending negotiations with the city's four municipal unions. He said that he would turn over all of the city's books to the unions and told them to challenge his administration's revenue predictions. In a meeting to brief reporters about this budget, he said something to the effect that there would be no more playing of the "hide the money" or "where's the money" game that had so often happen with the previous administration.

There will, of course, be much more about this in the Daily News and on WHYY 91FM tomorrow. Here's a quick wrap up from the Inquirer. We'll also be discussing this in depth. The Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority has also sent out their response to the Five Year Plan. They do express some concerns but compared to what they used to write about the previous administration's Five-Year Plans, they seem pretty satisfied with the city's assumptions and projections.

And... we will also begin rolling out a new project... a sort of "Son of The Next Mayor" that we hope will help everyone in Philadelphia (and the region) make sense of this whole process. I don't want to give too much away but rest assured that the state of the partnership between the Daily News and WHYY is strong.

Hello readers of the Next Mayor! As Dan alluded to yesterday, WHYY and the Philadelphia Daily News will be continuing the partnership that created this blog. In the coming weeks, we will unveil “It’s Your Money”, a multimedia project about the city budget process.

The city budget has typically been mysterious and inaccessible to the general public. We hope that our project can held shed some light on how things work and encourage broader participation in this discussion about the future of Philadelphia. We are counting on our readers to help make this project a success.

Please let us know what kind of content you want. We plan have a regularly updated blog with news and analysis about the budget. There will also be other multimedia such as video and audio. We’d love to hear suggestions by e-mail or in the comments for useful tools that could be part of this project.

Now, onto the analysis......

Yesterday, Michael Nutter presented his budget to City Council and the public. You can see Nutter’s speech and Dan’s analysis by reading this post. Nutter’s total budget proposal was $3.975 billion. His plan calls for a continued decrease in business taxes, moderate increases in spending, and a somewhat controversial proposal to fund the city’s pension obligation through floating a large municipal bond.

Nutter proposed increasing funding in a variety of areas. He already announced his intention to hire more police officers and spend more money on emergency medical services. Nutter’s plan also included significant investments in environmental initiatives and several other areas. We will be examining many of them in detail in the coming months.

The proposals to cut taxes shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Michael Nutter championed cuts in both the Business Privilege Tax and Wage Tax before he was even a candidate for mayor. The only surprise was his call to increase the parking tax from 15% to 20%. A group of business fiercely fought this proposal during the Street Administration. It will be interesting to see what happens on this one.

The most controversial portion of Nutter’s budget is likely to be his plan to float a $4.5 billion bond to fully fund the city’s pension obligations. Nutter believes this will lock payments into a regular schedule and improve the fiscal health of the city. It remains to be seen if a bond with such favorable terms would be possible in this market.

Any immediate thoughts?

You may have noticed a new but possibly familiar name attached to the previous post.

For the next few weeks, The Next Mayor blog and thenextmayor.com will be giving our friends at It's Our Money a place to crash until we get their new place up and running. They promise that they'll clean up after themselves and not eat our Doritos so we're letting them stay for a while.

The Daily News, in partnership with WHYY, and funded by the William Penn Foundation, is launching an effort to cover the city's budget in a way that citizens can understand. It's Our Money will provide a place for analysis, explanation, and public dialogue about the city's spending. There is definitely going to be plenty to talk about over the coming weeks as City Council holds its budget hearings and prepares to vote on the mayor's plan by the charter-mandated date of May 31st.

Yes, we will be covering those hearings and reporting on them - giving you the "who said what and which council person grilled which department head" but we expect that most other news organizations will be doing that as well, including our own reporters at the Daily News and WHYY. As we did with The Next Mayor, you can find that coverage at It's Our Money so it can become your one-stop shop for links to relevant stories.

However, It's Our Money will be more than just a web link gatherer. Our team will try to get behind the numbers and show you - whether you are a resident of Philadelphia or someone who lives in the suburbs and visits the city to work or play - how the decisions made by the Mayor and City Council will affect your lives.

We will bring you input from several of the region's leading experts on city taxes and spending but we also hope get your story and tell it to everyone. Are funding cuts affecting you or a program that you use? Are you a city employee who is concerned about your pension or wages? Or, even better, a city employee who has ideas about how our money (you are a tax payer too) can be spent more efficiently? We will definitely want to hear from you.

We want to make this process as participatory as possible because, after all, it is our money and we deserve a say in how it gets spent. Check back with us often over the next several weeks to find out how you can be a part of this project.

As for the It's Our Money team, here they are:

Ben Waxman - Ben is a longtime contributor to the Daily News having had several of his op-eds published. He's well known in the local blogosphere as one of the editors of Young Philly Politics and he's worked with or knows several of the folks who are involved in this budget process - from labor leaders to council members. This project has its own "heavy lifting" and Ben will be doing the bulk of it on a day to day basis.

Sandy Shea - Sandy is the Editorial Page Editor of the Daily News and knows everyone who knows anything about city government, the budget, tax payer issues. Sandy is the guiding force behind this project and her years of experience covering these issues will provide users of this project with a product of the highest quality.

Dan Pohlig - (that's me)... Having just finished up my role as the Producer and Researcher of The Next Mayor project, I am now the Senior Producer of Web News and Information for WHYY. As such, I'll be WHYY's liaison to It's Our Money and will help bring WHYY's capabilities to help make the information you find here work across all media - audio, video and web. I may also chime in occasionally on the blog with my own thoughts about the budget process.

All of the reporters from WHYY and the Daily News - In the course of their usual reporting on the budget process, the various reporters and columnists from these two organizations will be invaluable in providing a lot of the content that will keep you up to speed on where our money is going.

Questions about the project? Feel free to ask them in the comments below. We'll be checking throughout the day and try to answer as many as we can.

It would actually be kind of interesting to get the entire "advocacy community" in one room with a big pile of dollars in the middle and watch them fight it out for funding for their issues.

Wait... that's what the budget process is all about.

Anyway, the emails are starting to flow in from the groups that I've signed up for.

Brett Mandel of Philadelphia Forward (advocates for various tax and ethics reforms) seems happy:

BREAKING NEWS - Tax Reformers...This Budget's For You!

If City Council passes the proposed legislation, Philadelphia will take a big step toward implementing the vision of the Tax Reform Commission -- and a huge leap toward becoming a city that can attract and retain employers. For tax reformers who have been waiting for positive direction to move Philadelphia forward -- this budget's for you!

The Philadelphia Parks Alliance also seems to be in a good mood this morning:

City resources to Fairmount Park have been flat-lined for 30 years. Mayor Nutter is the first mayor in recent memory to significantly increase the park budget. This is a new day! It is a great start.

In today's Inquirer, the reaction from the President of Community College of Philadelphia:

[CCP President Stephen M.] Curtis, who had requested an increase of $2 million from the city, called the proposed $4 million increase "unexpected."

"I see this as his making that commitment real and tangible. His interest is not in the college but in the citizens of Philadelphia and their access to higher education," he said.

The emails and reactions from the groups who aren't so happy should start coming in any minute now.

Remember The Daily Show's "Storm Tracker Tracker?" Stephen Colbert went into a control room and kept track of the coverage of hurricanes and major storms by various cable news networks. He even assigned categories (1-5) to the levels of coverage. It still stands, in my mind, as some of the finest meta-coverage that has ever been done.

Since the presidential primary is still somewhat in doubt on the Democratic side, I'm going to run a regular feature that tracks the coverage and opinion of Mayor Nutter's endorsement of Senator Clinton. As you may have seen, I've already written about this (here and here). Said my piece. Have nothing else to offer. So instead, I'm just going to blog about what other people write on this topic.

And I'm not talking about those hundreds of stories that very quickly point out that Senator Clinton has the support of Governor Rendell and Mayor Nutter. I'm only going to include items that make the point that Nutter endorsed Senator Clinton and did not endorse Senator Obama - which is not just another way of saying he did endorsed Clinton. Let's just see how many times someone tries to make a story out of this.

In today's episode, we have a two-fer.

Late yesterday, Will Bunch, in Attytood, pointed out that some super delegates are ready to jump from the good ship Clinton over to the Obama express. He ends his post with:

Probably one of the few African-American Democrats not feeling the pressure is is our own Mayor Nutter. He doesn't have to face the voters for nearly four years...and he'll never switch from Clinton. It's going to take Nutter a while to forgive Obama.

Until Nutter does something to make us doubt that we should take him at his word, I'm not going to agree that he endorsed Clinton because Obama helped out Fattah very briefly and very early on during the mayoral primary. Maybe I'm just not cynical enough yet.

The other item in today's "Nutter endorsement of Clinton story tracker" is this column from Annette John-Hall who asks, "How can Nutter sidestep Obama?"

She says:

It feels refreshing, this young, new kind of African American politicians - Nutter, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty - leaders who don't make race their only talking points.

You can hear Nutter now. Hillary, it's a new day.

This, of course, is so not a story that's worth talking about anywhere but on obscure blogs that cover municipal government, politics and issues. So when it comes up in the paper, I'll be tracking it.

This is very much a late Friday afternoon post that has nothing to do with city government, the budget, or the mayor. NYT has a review of a book that explores this nation's embrace of not knowing the answers to questions:

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

USA! USA!

One of the most dramatic proposals made by Mayor Nutter on Thursday was floating ("to float" is to issue a security, though if you keep reading, maybe one of the other definitions of that word could apply) a $4.5 billion bond to fully fund the city's pension plan. It made headlines in both the Daily News and the Inquirer. If you're like me, a lot of the terms were somewhat unfamiliar. Let's break it down.

The city provides employees with a retirement plan called a pension. Municipal workers, like garbage collectors or police officers, contribute a portion of their salary to a fund that is matched by the City. The pension is called a defined benefit plan and requires the city to make fixed payments to individual over time. These payments are required regardless of the financial situation of the city.

The problem is that the cost of the pension program is skyrocketing because there are now more retirees than employees in the system. In 2007, more than $400 million of our tax dollars went to the pension fund. That number is expected to rise to nearly $500 million by 2012. A report entitled "The Silent Crisis" by the Pew Charitable Trusts and Pa. Economy League estimated that the city owed $3.9 billion to the pension fund.

Ok, so that explains the pension side. But what exactly is a bond? A bond is essentially a loan made to the city by banks and other financial institutions. It's somewhat similar to when a company goes public and issues stocks. The big difference is that stock-holders are partial owners of company and bond-holders are only lenders to the municipality. Cities that issue bonds must eventually pay back both the principal and the interest to the bond holders.

Nutter's wants to issue a $4.5 billion pension obligation bond to fund retirement benefits. This is the largest bond in the history of Philadelphia. The money will be placed into the pension fund and then invested into the stock market. The mayor believes that this will free up some money for the general fund in the short term and lock pension payments into a predictable schedule.

However, there are some who see it as a potentially risky proposal. In 1999, Philadelphia tried issuing a pension bond for $1.25 billion. The deal wound up costing the city millions because it was poorly structured and the city pension plan lost money in the stock market.

It will be interesting to see how the troubled national (and international) economy impacts the bond proposal. Markets are volatile, the bond insurer market is very troubled, so there are many questions: Will Philadelphia be able to secure a good interest rate? Does it make sense to put a huge infusion of cash into the stock market while things seem so shaky?

This pension obligation bond is complicated stuff. Can anyone think of a clearer way to explain this situation? And if so, can they explain it to Council, who will have to approve this idea?

Yesterday may have been a holiday, but that didn't stop the folks over at the Daily News from producing some budget related content. First, let's take a look at Dave Davies column on the pension obligation bond that we examined on this blog over the weekend. Davies is somewhat skeptical of the proposal.

I want a long second look. Any time somebody tells me the answer to a financial problem is to borrow a big heap of money, I get nervous.

I spoke Thursday to Duquesne business professor James Burnham, a former staffer at the federal reserve and director of World Bank who wrote a 2003 article about pension obligation bonds for a government financial officers magazine. It was called "Risky Business?"

Burnham says these deals amount to borrowing money to invest in the stock market. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. But he said you don't want to take risks if you're already stretched.

"You're doubling up, like in a poker game," Burnham said. "You're asking somebody to lend you money so you can throw more chips into the game."

Burnham noted that the federal government regards pension bonds as financial arbitrage, where you borrow money to invest at a profit, so the Treasury Department won't allow cities to issue them as tax-exempt debt.

And it's interesting that when a recent Pew Charitable Trusts study listed 13 steps Philadelphia could take to deal its the pension fund problem, a pension obligation bond wasn't one of them.

The other piece of budget related content from the Daily News was an editorial that challenged ordinary citizens to rethink they approach city government. It's very relevant, so I'll reprint the entire thing:

BURIED WITHIN Mayor Nutter's budget address last week was a revolutionary idea, and it had nothing to do with the $4.5 billion bond that he proposes the city float in order to more fully fund city pensions.

To hear his bold idea, you had to read between the lines, particularly the lines that said "the park gets an increase in funding" and "we'll give Community College $20 million more" and "we'll hire 200 more police and put in a 311 line" and "we'll eliminate part of the business privilege tax."

The message underlying it all: "We're going to take away the excuses for not having a better park, a more educated workforce, a more competitive city, a safer place to live."

Gulp. Now what?

Now, we get to face the truth: would we rather live in a city that actually works, or the shabby, troubled one we know and love to complain about?

Nutter's budget puts money on the table for some things that we are used to doing without. Now, we'll not only be able to demand results from the parks, and the cops and others. Now, we all will be expected to demand results, and raise our standards.

That's where the real revolution is. *

Soon after ABC News sent Charles Gibson to cruise around Philadelphia with Mayor Nutter, our local NBC station, the little station that could, sent one of their own reporters on a road trip with the Mayor. (You can watch it via Redlasso. Video from there still seems to crash my browser so I'll just put the link.)

The mayor doesn't seem to be as early a riser as John Street, with his notorious 3:30am wake up time, but he does work some late hours. I'm also hoping that his choice of morning beverage makes it ok for adults to order hot chocolate in the company of coffee drinkers. Maybe I'll stop getting those strange looks from folks when I order my own cup of hot chocolate-y goodness.

(As an aside, I'm still searching for the perfect cup of hot chocolate. Our city's many coffee shops and diners rave about how great their coffee is but seem to consider a good cup of hot cocoa to be an afterthought. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.)

Ok... that's my quota of fluff reporting for the day. Let's get back to the serious issues now.

Yesterday, Mayor Nutter blasted a no-bid contract awarded to Philadelphia Safe and Sound. PSS is a city-funded non-profit responsible for administering funds to organizations that provide services for needy children. The contract, awarded in the final days of the Street Administration, totaled $75 million which was $21 million more than authorized by City Council. Street instructed the Department of Human Services (DHS) to cut spending and used the savings to fund the contract for Safe and Sound without approval from Council.

Nutter plans to restore funding to DHS, reduce the amount of the contract from $75 million to $54 million, and undertake a through examination of Safe and Sound’s operations. There are in-depth stories on the controversy in both the Daily News and Inquirer. The Daily News also has an editorial that raises some important political questions about this latest move from the Nutter Administration:

It's hard not to wonder if Nutter's move yesterday is part of his animus toward Street. After all, the agency has not been accused of anything but receiving more money from the city. Shouldn't the news conference come when the results of the monitoring tell us if there's anything to worry about?

But we do like the idea of more accountability from any agency administering large amounts of public money. In fact, the amount of money spent on the city's children - $5 billion, according to Safe & Sound's own "Children's Budget" - is staggering. We should have a better handle on how effectively any of it is being spent.

At the same time, it's hard not to wonder if this push for increased accountability is politically motivated. According to the article in the Inquirer, one of the members of the panel that will be examining Safe and Sound's finances is former City Councilman Angel Ortiz. Ortiz (who I know and like) was a fierce critic of Mayor Street during his time as an elected official. That doesn't mean he can’t analyze the situation, but it does raise some questions about the objectivity of the panel. And how will this "monitoring" differ from the state's planned audit? Is this duplication of effort? And how public will the results of this monitoring be? Thoughts?

This is a stretch since D-Mac over at Philadelphia Will Do never explicitly mentions Nutter or his decision to back Hillary Clinton, but anyone who's been following this closely (I may be the only one) knows that when you see the word "mayor" with Obama and Clinton, I'll write about it.

Apparently, as D-Mac points out, the mayor of Cleveland is parlaying his status as "undecided" into promises for some fat ducats from whomever he eventually backs:

Both Obama and HRC want Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s endorsement. So, how to get it? Simple — none of this “new day politics” for Jackson. No, he’s old-school. He wants cash, or a check. He drew up a wish list asking for $6.3 billion over five years for Cuyahoga County, with the lion’s share going to Cleveland. He sent his 14-page plan to HRC and Obama earlier this week.

The plan is foolproof... assuming the eventual winner of the nomination and the presidency is the one who agrees to Jackson's demands. Somehow I don't think that the endorsement of the mayor of Cleveland (no matter how much that city rocks) is going to make much difference.