Candidate close-up: The first in a two-part profile series on the city’s mayoral candidates in Election ’03.
Mere hours after the news broke that an electronic listening device had been found in the ceiling of Mayor John Street’s City Hall office, his Republican opponent was sitting in the Review‘s conference room — with our own electronic listening device, a tape recorder, clearly visible.
Last Wednesday’s interview had been scheduled weeks in advance, but the Fates looked favorably upon this newspaper, as they occasionally do, providing us with one of the first cracks at the candidate’s reaction.
The FBI had already cleared the Katz campaign of any foul play, but at the time the agency was not saying much else.
The story broke, Katz said, as he was preparing for last Thursday night’s debate. Every cell phone in the room was ringing, yet the candidate claimed he continued to study.
By last Wednesday morning, neither Katz nor the rest of the city knew much about the details of the FBI probe. Rather than pouncing immediately on his seemingly wounded foe, he waited.
"The ability to manipulate a campaign through innuendo is not something that I [like]. It has been done against me," he said. "Now it is being done against him. If there is something there, this needs to be dealt with in a public way and quickly, in fairness to the public and in fairness to the Street administration."
But Katz didn’t wait in the weeds for long. During Tuesday morning’s radio debate with Street, the Republican accused the mayor of creating this problem with his policies of political cronyism — such as awarding contracts to companies that supported his campaign.
Katz, who also ran for mayor in 1991, lost the 1999 election by 2.2 percent of the votes. If he loses next month, it will likely be his last political campaign; the same goes for Street if he is defeated. The high stakes have fueled a bitter rivalry.
Katz, a West Mount Airy resident said that for a long time, "all I could taste was the death" of the last election. He blamed himself for the loss, for failing to distinguish himself from Street, and failing to mobilize his supporters on Election Day.
"We see divisions that voted at extraordinarily high levels relative to their historic voting," Katz said of the ’99 race. "Why did that happen? Was that legitimate? If we had some people at the polls, might that not have happened? I don’t know."
This time, Katz has an army.
Not only has his campaign staff increased from about 15 to 60 people, he said his Nov. 4 field operations will place supporters at every polling place in the city.
His army will be stocked with volunteers from the nearly dozen labor unions that have endorsed him. Katz received no labor support in the last election.
"Unions tend to understand the ramifications of a declining [economic] climate and population on their city and on their workers," Katz said.
His plan for reversing those trends is to stimulate the economy through tax cuts and a marketing plan to lure business to the city. Katz has promised to lower the wage tax to 3.5 percent from 4.5, and to phase out the gross-receipts tax placed on businesses.
"If the policy to cut wage taxes is to stimulate the economy, then why not go for the cut instead of doing it an inch at a time?"
Street has maintained that the city cannot cut taxes — at times, he has even opposed the small wage tax reductions — without slashing city services and locking up libraries and recreation centers. Katz argued that his cuts would show the region that Philadelphia wants to be a more competitive place for businesses.
The loss of revenue would affect city services, but to counteract that, Katz said he wants to borrow $750 million; less, if the state passes Gov. Rendell’s gambling legislation and picks up some of the tab for Philadelphia’s court and prison costs.
This makes people nervous, Katz admitted, so he suggested thinking about the debt as an investment in jobs. The city borrowed roughly $300 million to invest in new stadiums, fund the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, construct the Convention Center and finance the school district, he noted. These investments combined have created a fraction of the jobs Katz claims his plan would generate. Over the next 10 years with his tax plan, he predicted the city would see 60,000 new jobs.
"Let’s assume I’m wrong. We raise the taxes back up, pay off the bonds and we are back where we were," he said. "Unfortunately, where we were is a declining city that continues to lose business and lose jobs."
But tax cuts alone will not attract business. Katz said the city needs to market itself as a place for companies to relocate.
While he was executive director of Greater Philadelphia First, he started a similar regional marketing campaign. Part of the region’s problem is it steals business from itself, Katz said. Camden takes business from Philadelphia; the city steals from Montgomery County; Delaware steals from Chester County.
"We are using limited tax dollars to move pieces around on the chess board instead of getting everyone together to use those same resources to subsidize firms to relocate within the region and go and attract companies from North Carolina, Boston and Chicago."
Katz wants to raise another $1 billion over the next four years to pump into the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. Of that, $25 million a year would come from each of the city, state, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and private foundations.
Using that equity, he said the city could leverage another $600 million in mortgage capital that would be used to subsidize housing for the working poor, first-time home buyers, the elderly and the disabled.
Operation Safe Streets is not working for the city at large, Katz said. It has been successful in protecting the pockets where police have been stationed, but in many cases crime in surrounding areas has increased.
This is a tactical problem, said the candidate: "If you’re fighting a guerilla war, you don’t want to tell the other side where you’re going to be."
Besides creating special courts to expedite cases involving drugs and guns, Katz said he would appoint a deputy mayor of public safety. That person’s job would be to coordinate the work of the police with prosecutors and judges, as well as federal agencies like Drug Enforcement, the FBI and the ATF.
His ideal candidate for such a job? Former Police Commissioner John Timoney, who is now head of Miami’s police department. Katz added that several others in Philadelphia also have the background to fill the position.
The greatest issue of this campaign might be: Do the issues even matter? Philadelphia’s population is divided — 45-percent white and 43-percent black, with Asian and Hispanic minorities comprising the remaining 12 percent.
According to the nonprofit political watchdog Committee of Seventy, in 1999, the mayor received 91 percent of the votes cast in the city’s black neighborhoods; Katz carried 83 percent of the votes cast in the white neighborhoods.
In South Philly, the last mayoral election proved that party affiliation was not the greatest factor.
Katz voters dominated in the Second Ward (east of Broad Street, between South Street and Washington Avenue), which includes white neighborhoods like Bella Vista and Queen Village. He also took the First Ward (east of Broad, including most blocks between Washington and Mifflin Street), 39th Ward (east of Broad, below Mifflin) and 26th Ward (west of Broad, south of Passyunk Avenue). Those areas also are largely white — and traditionally Democratic.
Street countered, winning Wards 30 (Lombard Street to Washington, west of Broad) and 36 (most blocks between Washington and Moore, west of Broad). Both have mostly black populations. The mayor also won the 48th Ward (most blocks between Passyunk and Moore, west of Broad), which is split almost evenly between white and black voters but has a formidable number of other minority residents.
Katz is aggressively campaigning for the minority vote this election. He has commercials on Spanish radio stations. He has reached out to the diverse Asian communities, which he claims has been a successful effort. And the campaign began running a television spot earlier this month that plays off Street’s infamous comment about who runs the city. It features a black woman who says, "This is the City of Brotherly Love, and the brother that I am voting for is Sam Katz."
Katz remains realistic about how much of the minority vote he will get next month. He tells a story about his grandmother, who was legally blind, and the 1971 election, when he accompanied her into the voting booth to read the ballot. There were about 50 candidates for City Council-at-Large, Katz remembers. As he read aloud the list of names, he said his grandmother picked the ones that sounded Jewish.
"So now I see people who vote for John or me," he said, "whether it’s racial or religious, that’s how people unfortunately make a lot of their decisions.
"Everybody is going to have their own reasons for what they do. The key to this election is which of us is going to turn out more of their own base and cut into the other person’s base."
If 2003 is anything like 1999, Katz’s magic number is 2.2 percent.
