Happy Inauguration Day – Some Free Advice For The New Mayor
What a thrill! A guy who dreamed as a young man that the only job he wanted was to be Mayor of Philadelphia, is now the Mayor of Philadelphia.
Michael Nutter will be the seventh Mayor in my time here as a journalist. So, with the experience of watching the governing of Tate, Rizzo, Green, Goode, Rendell, and Street, I offer some free and unsolicited advice, not that Michael Nutter really needs it.
First of all, Mr. Mayor, trust the people you’ve hired, and their advice. Trust them as long as they are loyal and honest. Make sure they tell you what they honestly feel, not what they think you want to hear. Good people make great administrations.
Send messages. The view from the top is important. The messages you send to taxpayers, business people, city workers and the like, are very important. Your level of communication is very important to your success. The guy who proceeded you never cared about communication, not realizing that communication is the beginning of understanding. Your message to potential criminals should be harsh.
Never walk away from a person holding a microphone, unless that person is one who uses personal attacks as a weapon. Bad days happen. Good days are terrific. If there is bad news at your doorstep, deal with it head on. Don’t try to escape contact with the media. Don’t fuss about bad news. It’s going to happen. That’s just the natural way of things. This is your strong point anyway, so I know I’m preaching to the choir on this one.
Use your mandate to effect daily change in the quality of life for Philadelphians. This category could be as simple as improving street signs, making City Hall more pleasant to visit, experimenting with more outreach programs, sparkling up the libraries, and by all means, cleaning up the airport.
Support the arts, but also demand that the arts and culture are available to all the people, not just a select few. Make sure that the city’s rich cultural scene is available to people who can’t afford being there. This is a sore point with me, and always has been.
Don’t stop thinking about crime. It is the number one threat to this community. Work closely with the District Attorney Abraham. She is as good as it gets. Take her advice. She is rarely wrong.
Enjoy the job. Thing about how much you can change the city. Talk to the people as much as you can, in the city and suburbs alike. People have a clearer view of problems and possibilities.
Finally, keep being as humble as you can. The trappings of power can distort one’s view of himself or herself. I doubt that it will happen to you, but guard against this.
Good luck, and congratulations.
Comments(11)
Mr. mayor, here is some more free and unsolicited advice from the loyal public. Downtown is arguably the bread and butter of our city. When international visitors come to our city they take the news of the homeless gathering around (particularly in the summer)some of the city’s main attractions. The stories they tell are not so flattery. Let us together please do something about the image, the welcome impact, and the wow factor of our city. A beautified environment wakes the inner beauty of all- scratch- most humans. I will do my part.
Ignore at least half of the Daily News editorial that says to leave PGW and PHA alone. No good leader simply ignores their charge, and Street has stuffed PHA with last minute appointments that are bound to cause you problems.
PHA has great new stuff, but the old stuff is still there, and that means plenty of vacant lots, empty properties, older houses too expensive to maintain or renovate, and new changes in funding coming from the state and federal level all the time. The wise leader will allow PHA financial flexibility to sell properties scattered around in the most valuable locations to pay for continued new designated senior assisted living and disabled only housing.
PGW is only solvent because of Rendell selling the old property tax lien debt to a private collector, resulting in payment of what Street called “uncollectable bad debt.” That bad debt is no longer bad, because those empty lots and vacant properties can be sold to new owners. That is how the “bad debt” is paid off finally, with the remainder going to the old owners.
City held real estate and non property tax or lien paying real estate cheats schools, PGW, PWD, and is the reason for Philly’s once decimated, now renewing property tax base.
Keep the good work going by letting the private market build where it can, reserving government efforts for projects where the private market can’t go yet.
Realize that journalists don’t have MBAs too often, and can’t see the spreadsheet information, don’t know that a lien is paid at a property sale, too often, and get bogged down in ideas without knowing that finance and revenues growing steadily will be the only source of your success since it is how the city pays for everything it does.
The recent real estate boom resulting in old properties in limbo getting renovated and sold at market value explains the PGW bad debt pay down.
That is contributed in large part by lien sales and foreclosures. Realize that there is no “all bad guy” in foreclosure, since city liens get paid at every auction.
The city will have to step up foreclosure on properties that owe over a certain amount for a certain length of time. A rule of thumb should be that we have as many properties for sale in the Tax Delinquency listings as does the Tax Lien or Mortgage sales. There’s going to be a lot of resistance on this from the bad city council members who try to prevent too much voter shift. The city can’t afford this any longer.
$527 million in overdue property taxes is owed the city, and that was from when taxes were lower. Establish an understanding that Fair Market Value can’t be entirely revenue neutral given that properties have not been reassessed at the same time. Some people pay taxes that are essentially decades out of date.
Shifting from no wage tax, no BRT, and low business taxes means we have to take property taxes seriously – assessing them uniformly, and collecting them in full and on time.
Don’t let the ninny press cry end of the world on that issue.
Collecting property taxes won’t cause mass homelessness, as Street held. It will cause some people to rent instead of own who can’t afford the house they inherited, for example. But a significant number of properties in Philly that owe taxes are vacant.
http://www.hallwatch.org/proptax/about/redelinq/stats/topdelinquents/mailingaddress
This link shows that the largest source of blighted, delinquent properties are held by city agencies, the RDA, the city, and etc.
The city can’t afford to hold this potentially income producing property for the city out of the private market that pays the city revenue.
This was a sentence that Street feared, since he depended on the RDA to continue pay to play. He recently put a new RDA Street-friendly appointee on the RDA his last day in office — what does that tell you?
This property has to go back to property tax paying owners yesterday — forget trying to get contributions to the party to stage a handful of deals when tens of thousands of properties have to remain fallow.
Can I add that PHA can’t pay zero on most of its properties in property taxes? And neither should Universal Companies, or some of the other iffy affordable housing builders who acquire and hold for years before turning properties over.
You incentivize them to wait to build, and speculate on future value. Vacant lots have to be assessed at about what properties are — a land tax valuation to make it expensive to wait years to build.
This creates new owners during your term — terms– of office.
Please charge the new butthead council people, esp. the one taking your council slot, Mr. Nutter, with the ethics violations they’ve committed before even coming in. He’s bad right out of the box with his inability to spend money in a line item for the designated purpose. He’ll embarrass you if you don’t deal with his ethics right away. The whole council has to realize today that there is a new sheriff in town, and you can’t ignore ethics and campaign rules, so get used to being good.
There are properties in PHA that they never touch. These properties somehow, house drug dealers and takers, but somehow, seem to have a satellite dish. PHA is not vigilant with who it lets live in the properties that are scattered outside of on-site managed projects.
This old housing stock is too old to use, so sell it, please. Then build new PHA stuff but only for the people who need it most – the disabled, the elderly ONLY. That’s what Pittsburgh did the AP recently reported. 84,000 tenants is insane, and while the new properties are state of the art, the insanity is apparent on any street with a lot of the old scattered housing. PHA has to do better or sell it.
Owners should be able to complain to PHA online, and access police reports about druggy tenants. PHA knows this is an ongoing problem.
On the other hand, why is PHA housing for life? Why not have a time limit to allow people who have great need to use it? Many people have income increasing yet they still live in PHA housing. But they are no longer poor or low income at all. You can easily see this from the car they drive, and the jobs they work. This includes members of PHA’s own staff. How can someone making as much as a doctor still live in PHA housing?
It makes one less house available. Meanwhile a person who could live fine in the private market won’t vacate their PHA property. If someone wants to own, then let them buy it at fair market value — real market value.
Otherwise, PHA becomes a pricey boondoogle that houses people but fails to serve its mandate — those in need. How can the press claim that a good course is to “leave PHA alone?” Isn’t that the whole problem?
If the previous NUT JOB’S rantings are any indication of what Nutter’s supporters are all about then we are in big trouble. The needless 4 AM rambling discourse is a clear indication of someone who needs a better health care system and not a better housing authority. This guy is nut’n but a Nutter nut with a nut loose.
Larry,Mayor nutter does remind of the nutty professor (jerry lewis version),but i think he is the right man for the job and he is bringing Hope and Change to phila.
GO-NUT-GO
Mr. Nutter,
Congratulations. That being said, now let’s get it done. I know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but you are, for better or worse, coming into this office with such high expectations that I’m afraid the preverbial clock on you started ticking before you were sworn in.
You’re first three priorities should be crime, the next five should have something to do with schools. If people feel safe, and feel like this is an environment they can raise a family in, you’ll be quite suprised how much of the rest of it will take care of itself.
For what it’s worth, bring the bike cops back, in force. Bikes, horseback (yes horses), foot beats…make these men and women as visible as possible. You don’t need them on the Blvd anymore, let the cameras earn their keep.
Good luck.
Larry , even though we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things I would never sabotage your site with the profane outpourings of lj or lovethenut. This type of person promotes the most backward form of democracy you can imagine. To be sure,in a decent democracy
free speech should be an integral part of its being but the perverted postings of this character do nothing but stymie the flow of information and opinions which make up your site. Even though there is nothing flagrently offensive in what he says, the main objective of his discourse was to preempt your readers from making a comment on Mr. Nutter.