Well, yesterday when I included a quick update on the Mayor's public schedule I promised that someone would be writing about what he was doing out in the burbs and I was right:
Mayor Nutter fired up his hybrid SUV and dialed up GPS coordinates to preach cooperation in places that have seen few emissaries from City Hall in recent years: Doylestown, Norristown and Media.
He made a lightning sweep through county seats in Bucks, Montgomery and Delaware Counties, preaching cooperation to local officials who have heard it before - though not since Mayor Rendell in the 1990s.
Afternoon No. 102 of Nutter's mayoral administration was largely, he acknowledged, a "meet-and-greet opportunity" to exchange staff-member contact lists with his neighbors and figure out where areas of mutual self-interest lie.
Yay!
"Politics is one thing; personal relationships, I think, are something else," Nutter said. "If you have both working, you can get so much more done. So I'm trying to build good professional and personal working relationships."
Though not quite as daunting a task as bringing peace to the Middle East, fostering cooperation among the 5 southeastern Pennsylvania counties would be nothing short of a miracle. You know we'll be keeping track of these developments.