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CHAPTER 4

Aren’t You on City Council? What Are You Going to Do About That?

I ran for City Council in 1987 according to the plan that I had developed with Councilman Anderson, against an incumbent named Ann Land. She’d been in office for about six years, and had been a member of Philadelphia’s Democratic establishment for some time. Earlier in her life she had campaigned for John F. Kennedy. I lost this election by 1,882 votes. Not that I think about it very much! It was a close race, and it was just the two of us. In this first race, in 1987, the Fourth District was majority white by 55 percent. But in the ensuing years it would be closer to a 50–50 split. During my first campaign I knocked on ten thousand doors. I introduced myself. I put my face on posters, and people wondered why I would do this in the eastern part of the district, which was overwhelmingly white. I explained that the Fourth District needed to know who I was, and voters there seemed to appreciate my honesty. In the 1987 campaign Roxborough was 95 percent white, and I got 17 percent of the vote. Four years later in 1991, I would get 34 percent, and in 1995, 64 percent of that vote.

I vowed on the night that I lost in 1987 to run again in four years. Meanwhile I went back to the investment banking firm where I’d been working. The firm’s owner had been a good friend of Councilman Anderson and appreciated my commitment to public service, but he would gently remind me that I could make a lot more money in investment banking. I worked there for three years, came back in the 1991 election, and won.

From the start, I planned to be a pretty active legislator. I had grown up through the City Council process, and I genuinely liked the council. When I joined I knew many of the members from my work with John Anderson, although not necessarily that well.

I had a tremendous team to support me while serving on the City Council. Debra Brown was the first person I asked to work in my City Council office. After I won the election, and not knowing Debra’s exact address, I went back to the block where I thought she lived and knocked on doors until I found her, and offered her a job. Unquestionably loyal, a tremendously hard worker, and a good person, she had a bird’s-eye view on all that happened, from the City Council to the mayor’s office. Debra is also special because she shares my daughter Olivia’s birthday! I first met Bobby Johnson because he was a longtime friend of John Anderson and his family, and based on that relationship and friendship he joined my council office, working mainly in the district office in Wynnefield, and then joining my mayoral administration. Bobby is just an all-around good man—low key, fun, highly reliable, and a good friend to many. Wadell Ridley’s daughter and my daughter attended daycare together, and we have been friends a long time, through many battles. Wadell was part of my office, and, along with Steve Jones, was involved in all of the political campaigns and activities. I turned to Arlene Petruzzelli when I was looking for someone to run my district office in the Twenty-First Ward, which includes Roxborough and Manayunk. The ward leader had recommended her, and Arlene was hard charging, funny, and down to earth—a wonderful and sweet woman, who died a number of years ago after retiring from my office. She worked tirelessly to help and serve anyone, at any time, until the work was done. Mary Turtle took Arlene’s place after she retired and moved to Florida, and was known for speaking her mind on behalf of constituents. She very effectively managed the often complicated relationships in this part of the city, with its numerous civic organizations, and also came on board for my mayoral administration.

The council president assigns members their budget, staff, and offices, so for this reason and many others it’s an enormously powerful role, at least in Philadelphia. Your budget, desk, and even the chance to have your office painted are all determined by the council president. Obviously, it behooved me to try to maintain a positive relationship with the president, but we had a rocky start. The City Council president, future mayor John Street, had supported my opponent during the election, so we had a straight and frank talk about that issue. I told him I hadn’t appreciated his support of my opponent; he told me he hadn’t appreciated some of my criticism of him during the campaign, and we left it at that. Political life goes on.

At the start of my first term I was already known to be pretty independent. I tried to get along with folks and not be unpleasant, but I had some strongly held views about certain things, and there was a limit to the amount that I was going to compromise on those views. On the one hand, nobody passes council legislation on their own. You need eight and sometimes eleven other members to make that happen, and friendships and relationships are vital to getting there. On the other hand, I didn’t go to city hall to be popular—I went there to get stuff done and make decisions.

Generally, if a fellow council member had supported me and asked for my support on legislation around which I didn’t have particularly strongly held beliefs, then I would be inclined to listen, and support the legislation if it made sense for my constituents. But on legislation that touched my strong or core beliefs, I let fellow council members know that I would make my decision early on about whether I was for or against the legislation. I would tell sponsors of the legislation that I supported, “You don’t need to waste time calling me anymore, because I’m for this.” And I would tell sponsors of the legislation that I opposed, “You don’t need to waste time calling me anymore, because I’m against this.”

So unless they devised something so incredible, so spectacular, like anything beyond what I could imagine, they were, truly, wasting their political time. We could have ten meetings, we could have one meeting, and the outcome would be the same.

Some other City Council members had more angst around their decision making. I would advise them to resolve it, make a decision, and the sun will come up tomorrow. They would let members torment them with meetings and endless phone calls to woo their vote. As for myself, when I passed someone who wanted my vote in the halls, I would tell them “I’m good, I haven’t changed my mind. How are you today?”

I ended up tackling some big issues very early on. My first big initiative on the City Council stemmed from concerns about the relationship between police and the community. There had been a couple of scandals here and there, and citizens beaten and roughed up, so I pieced together legislation to create an independent police advisory commission. I was not, and I still am not, antipolice. I support good police officers, but I’m also certainly pro-community. I think we need a forum or a place where good community people and good police officers can meet, get to know each other, and develop respect.

I introduced this highly controversial piece of legislation right out of the gate, when I was all of eight months into the job, in September 1992. It provoked a significant fight with new mayor Ed Rendell, who emphatically rejected the commission idea. He was a former prosecutor and didn’t want to ruin his relationships with the police. Ed and I were friends, but I was committed to doing this work. He vetoed the bill and the council subsequently overrode his veto, 12 to 5.

Also during my first term, my new colleague and former boss, Angel Ortiz, had put forward legislation to give benefits to same-sex domestic partners of city employees. This legislation would only have applied to public employees, and it only provided for domestic partnership benefits—things such as health insurance benefits, a right to transfer property to the partner without fees, and the ability to assign a pension to a same-sex partner. We didn’t have the authority to do anything about same-sex marriage—that’s a state issue—but this would provide some similar benefits of marriage to city employees, at least.

The domestic partnership bill was being proposed about the same time as my police commission legislation. And I have to confess that I was not as supportive of that legislation at the time as I should have been, because the council president was supporting my police advisory commission and opposed the domestic partnership legislation, and wanted me to do the same, as an informal quid pro quo for his support of my legislation. This was an early lesson in my rookie term on the kind of horse trading that can occur, and the pressure that relationships can exert on legislative decisions on the council.

The police commission happened, and domestic partnership benefits did not, and I held myself somewhat responsible for that. It stuck with me that I had unfinished business. I was reelected to the council in 1995. I decided that I needed to remedy and make up for what I had not done in 1993 on the domestic partnership issues. I wrote three pieces of legislation in 1999 on those issues—and council president Street was furious about it. We had been working together on several things, and he knew that I knew that he was adamantly opposed to domestic partnership benefits, so I think from his perspective, he probably thought I was being disloyal if not presumptuous to write and introduce these three pieces of legislation.

From my perspective, I had to some extent retrained my mind, values, and judgement around the matter, and I felt that I was revisiting an issue that I should have supported years earlier. Far from being premature, the legislation, to me, seemed many years overdue. Street and I had some blowout conversations around this issue, and it is among the one or two factors that opened a huge rift between us.

There were numerous hearings around the domestic partnership legislation, and people would come to city hall and say the ugliest things imaginable about domestic partners, same-sex couples, and the LGBT community.

This legislation would be a meaningful step toward fairness, on its own terms, but it’s also true that local government policies are often the leading edge or inspiration for changes in the private sector. As a council member I believed that government, in many instances, should lead the charge on issues of equity, fairness, justice, and rights, and propel the private sector forward. In this case, I knew that the council would hear from the private sector that they were a little nervous about the government establishment of domestic partnership benefits, because then they would start hearing from their own employees. This raised the stakes on the legislation, and likewise the political battle and furor surrounding it.

In 1997 and 1998, it was already obvious that Street was probably going to run for mayor in 1999. In part I argued the legislation’s case to him by pointing out, “You have your personal position, everyone knows that you don’t support this legislation. Why not get it over with now, and you won’t have to campaign on or around it in 1999 or revisit it as mayor?”

With seventeen members we needed nine to pass the legislation, and it was a challenge to find those nine. Eventually, all three pieces passed. Ultimately, one bill passed 9–8, so we didn’t have much on the margins. There was absolutely no room for political error. Rendell was still the mayor at this point, and he was eager to get the legislation passed and cleared out of the council. As legislation, the domestic partnership provisions worked well, and I’m especially proud that I had a hand in their passage.

My major City Council accomplishment in 2000 was to introduce the first legislation on a smoking ban in the city. That legislation actually began with my daughter, Olivia. She was five years old in 2000, and Lisa, my wife, was out of town. Lisa was a consultant and traveled a fair amount, so rather than torture our daughter by trying to prepare a perhaps inedible meal at home, we went out for dinner at a city restaurant.

We were sitting and chatting at the table, and Olivia was drawing. She looks up and says, “Daddy, that man over there is smoking.”

I replied, “Well yes, people do that sometimes.”

She goes back to her drawing and then she says, “Well, does he know that can kill him?”

And I said, “Well yeah, he probably does, but, you know, he’s an adult.”

Olivia returns to her drawing. Suddenly she says, “Well, aren’t you on City Council? What are you going to do about that?”

So much for a quiet evening with my daughter!

I started doing research on smoking bans in other large cities; in particular, New York City was in the process of developing this sort of legislation. During this exploratory phase, Katherine Gajewski, an extremely smart and creative policy mind, started working with me as a consultant around the smoking ban legislation. She was a relentless driving force in the messaging, outreach, and advocacy around the issue (eventually, she joined my City Council staff, and would serve as the chief sustainability officer in my administration, leading Philadelphia to become internationally recognized in this area). After I’d done a fairly substantial amount of research on secondhand smoke, and waded through many denials from the tobacco industry about its dangers—just as they had earlier denied that cigarettes were addictive and unhealthy—I introduced a piece of legislation in 2000 for a smoking ban that went nowhere. There was great consternation that the world would end, the economy would tank, and people would lose their jobs.

While New York continued to refine and upgrade their smoking ban to make it even more stringent and encompassing, I kept making amendments and talking to my colleagues, but many were unyielding in their opposition. The tobacco industry was nowhere to be heard, but rest assured that they were behind the scenes, stealthily trying to undermine the legislation. As part of the big tobacco settlement, the large tobacco companies had to release millions of pages of documents. I went through a fair amount of that material since it was publicly available, and found a few documents that indicated that there was actually a significant amount of collusion between the tobacco industry and the liquor industry. I buried my council colleagues with this kind of information and more, but in this particular case I don’t think the information and data mattered as much to the legislation’s ultimate success as two other things.