Candidate close-up: The second in a two-part profile series on the city’s mayoral candidates in Election ’03.
John Street is the mayor, obviously. John Street is also a candidate. While at times he seems uncomfortable playing either role, he would surely choose his City Hall office over his campaign office any day — at least before it was bugged.
Street does not have the luxury of choice, unfortunately for him, especially during an election year. Yet he declined to meet one-on-one with a Review reporter to discuss his vision for the city for the next four years and issues as they pertain to South Philadelphia.
In the interest of full disclosure, the Review first requested an interview as early as last month through Joel Avery, the Street campaign’s liaison handling community newspapers. Avery flatly denied the request, saying that Street’s full-time job was running the city and that his schedule could not accommodate interviews with all of the weekly newspapers.
A second inquiry several days later also was turned down, even after we informed Avery that Republican Sam Katz had agreed to meet with us. This did seem to pique the liaison’s interest, however.
Avery called back a week later to say the Review would get its chance, but it would have to share the mayor’s time with another paper. Fine. We gave him a week’s worth of times we were available, only to be shut out again days later.
Avery said Street just couldn’t fit the Review in and reminded us about the mayor’s full-time job and that Katz’s only responsibility was to be a candidate.
The consolation prize was an invitation to Street’s next roundtable for weekly media — to which we already had an open invitation — where, Avery guaranteed, the Review would have the opportunity to ask all its burning questions.
That particular session took place two weeks ago — the day after the news broke that an electronic listening device had been found in the ceiling of Street’s City Hall office.
The purpose of this detailed disclosure is not to bash Street for his relationship with the media. We assume our readers — and there’s roughly 250,000 of them in South and Southwest Philly, just so you know, Mr. Mayor — would be insulted that Street passed at the chance to personally address them. But the Review realizes that the mayor’s plan to combat taxes, blight and crime impacts the readers’ lives more than whether or not he talks to us.
Street, during his tenure as mayor thus far, accomplished many of the items on the to-do list he made in his 1999 campaign.
He began by towing 33,000 abandoned vehicles from the city roadways less than two months after he took office. This became a foothold for his fight against blight and his promise that his administration would focus on neighborhoods.
Street outlined the Neighborhood Transformation Initiative in March 2001 and, after a battle with City Council President Anna Verna and other members, the body approved it in June 2002.
As of last month, the city had demolished 4,106 dangerous residential properties, hauled away 33,000 tons of garbage from 31,000 vacant lots, and towed more than 185,000 abandoned cars under NTI.
The blight initiative also resulted in the construction of 2,258 new homes and another 2,870 new public-housing units. The city also has acquired 5,334 vacant properties.
Street, who recently celebrated his 60th birthday, frequently talks about the importance of assembling a critical mass of properties to create a land bank from which private developers could assemble larger parcels for development.
When Street took office, the School District of Philadelphia received $1,900 less per student from the state compared to the surrounding suburbs. First-year teachers in the district earned $3,000 less than their counterparts outside the city.
Those differences have decreased as a result of the state takeover that Street negotiated with former Gov. Mark Schweiker. The deal committed the state to $86 million in new funding — plus another $45 million from the city — and prevented the state from handing the whole system over to for-profit manager Edison Schools.
In exchange for the state’s money, the city relinquished partial control of the school district. The School Reform Commission, comprised of two mayoral appointees and two state representatives, replaced the old Board of Education.
Street has said he wants to maintain the state’s involvement in the schools even after the district regains solid financial footing. Katz has said he wants to see the restoration of home rule within the next four years.
The mayor’s success in fighting crime is debatable. Street stands behind Operation Safe Streets. The program started in May 2002 and has cost the city millions of dollars.
The strategy is to station police on corners in neighborhoods known as havens for crime, particularly drugs. Street’s campaign has anointed the program the city’s savior, but the statistics are conflicting.
Overall crime dropped 20 percent during the first year of Safe Streets, according to the Street campaign. Also, between May and December 2002, police seized $81 million in illegal narcotics — nearly six times more than was seized a year prior.
But murders are on the rise just a year after Philadelphia recorded the fewest homicides in 17 years, logging 288 in 2002. But by August 2003, 224 murders already had been tallied. Shootings and gunpoint robberies also have increased.
Katz has been quick to note that arrests are down, too. Street has countered that the goal of Safe Streets is not just to arrest suspects but also to disrupt the drug trade.
Taxes have been another controversial area. Street said in 1999 that the city cannot afford significant cuts to the wage tax, and he is repeating it in this campaign.
The mayor predicted gloom and doom when Councilmen Frank DiCicco and Michael Nutter introduced legislation last year that would continue the modest cuts to the wage tax started by former Mayor Ed Rendell. The bill passed unanimously, but it took a spirited rally outside City Hall before the mayor changed his mind.
"I’m not offended by the fact that Council wants wage-tax cuts," Street told the Review in an April 2002 interview that he requested — and the sole one-on-one this newspaper has had with the mayor during his tenure. "I’ll do the cuts, and I won’t whine about it. I am just telling you we won’t be able to give raises … We are going to have to do some things that might be uncomfortable for Council members."
The legislation reduced the wage tax from 4.54 to 4.5, with more cuts scheduled over the next five years. Katz has proposed reducing the wage tax to 3.5 percent, phasing out the gross-receipts tax over the next decade. The Street campaign calls this a "blueprint for disaster."
Street believes the city would benefit more by cutting the city’s gross-receipts tax, which is a lower-profile move but arguably a better one for the city in the long run. The mayor signed legislation to cut the tax incrementally during the next five years at the same time he approved the wage-tax reductions.
Another issue is the mayor’s position on the Live Stop program and his baffling sympathy for the city’s unlicensed, uninsured motorists.
Live Stop has confiscated 34,000 vehicles driven by unlicensed and uninsured motorists since it expanded citywide in July 2002. Yet in August, Street asked Traffic Court President Judge Francis E. Kelly to give illegal drivers 45 days of amnesty after the program had been running for more than a year.
Street has managed to lower insurance rates for the city’s motorists. The mayor at the beginning of September announced the state insurance department had agreed to force auto insurers to lower their rates for most drivers.
Motorists with limited tort coverage — which caps the amount a person can sue for pain and suffering — will benefit from a 20-percent decrease in premiums. About 70 percent of Philadelphia’s drivers have limited tort coverage.
