Aye. The ayes are 17; the nays are zero. A majority of all members having voted in the affirmative, the bill passes. We will now consider Bill No. 110346.
An ordinance 6/23/11 - STATED - 2ND READING amending Chapter 10-100 of The Philadelphia Code, entitled "Animals," to establish provisions for the reporting of wild raccoons, and to provide for the manner of their abatement.
This bill having been read on two different days, the question now is shall the bill pass finally. The Chief Clerk will please call the roll.
Aye. The ayes are 17; the nays are zero. A majority of all members having voted in the affirmative, the bill passes. That concludes our Calendar for today -- the Clerk will please read any additional resolutions on today's Calendar.
A resolution condemning the City of Philadelphia's agreement with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement to allow immediate access to arrest information, and urging the City to discontinue the agreement with ICE when 6/23/11 - STATED - 2ND READING it expires August 31, 2011, introduced by Councilman Kenney.
I move the adoption of the resolution. (Duly seconded.)
It has been moved and seconded that the resolution be adopted. All in favor will indicate by saying aye. (Aye.)
The ayes have it and the motion carries. Councilman Jones -(Applause.)
-- do you want to be recognized at the conclusion of the Calendar?
A resolution calling on the Pennsylvania Senate to pass House Bill 639 which was approved with bi-partisan support by the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in April of 2011, introduced by Councilwoman Blackwell.
Thank you, Madam President. I move for the adoption. (Duly seconded.)
It has been moved and seconded that the resolution be adopted. All in favor will say aye. (Aye.)
The 6/23/11 - STATED - 2ND READING ayes have it and the resolution is adopted.
And a resolution recognizing and honoring St. Cecilia Parish on its 100th Anniversary, introduced by Councilman O'Neill.
It has been moved and seconded that the resolution be adopted. All in favor will indicate by saying aye. (Aye.)
The ayes have it and the resolution is adopted. That completes our Calendar for on the part of the minority? (No response.)
Are there speeches on the part of the majority? The Chair recognizes Councilman Jones.
Thank you, Madam President. I just wanted to thank this body. I want to thank this body on behalf of the Walter Palmer Leadership Academy, Overbrook Educational Center, Dobbins High School, James Central High School, North Philadelphia Community School, Cook Wissahickon School and Daroff Universal Charter Schools, because this body, in spite of whether you were for soda or for real estate, did not let the students, the public school students of the City of Philadelphia, become the unintended victims of whatever finger pointing from the federal government and package, to the surplus at the state, to the potential mismanagement and contracts at the School Board, did not let them become the victims. It was heavy lifting. No one, no one likes raising taxes, but I applaud my colleagues for standing up to not looking at the next poll, but looking towards the next generation and doing the right thing. And I'm proud of you and I'm proud of this body for doing that in spite of all of the heckles and jeckles that we got, jeers that we got for doing it, but at the end of the day some day, at a graduation, coming soon to a community near you, there is going to be someone there that went to an accelerated school or kindergarten, that rode a yellow bus or ate a free lunch that will thank you. So I'm going to be the first in line. Thank you very much, Council.
Thank you, Madam President. This December I will be in this body for 20 years. It's been a long time and never thought it would go so fast. One of the things I keep hearing -- and it's annoyed me every year for the past 20 years -- is that somehow after we leave here today, we are all going on a 12-week vacation. In the 20 years that I've been here, with the exception of maybe six years ago I believe I took an extended vacation to go out of the country for the first time, other than that, I don't believe, as I've gone through my memory, I have taken a full week off either in the winter, spring, summer or fall. I was reading a newspaper last year at my desk in July or August and it was an editorial from one of our newspapers saying that when Councilmembers are in the sand down at the beach and playing golf and whatever, whatever, while we're on vacation, you know, and whatever the issue they were talking about. So I called the editorial writer, the editor of the editorial page, and said, I'm reading your editorial from my desk in City Hall. I didn't realize that I was off, but I want to thank you for the day off, I think I'll go do something now. The point is is that we work all summer long. As a matter of fact, I have a hearing scheduled on Tuesday, the 28th. I'm here. And what happens is, I think that the media, who continues to promote this 12-week vacation, are the very same people that I run into Monday through Friday in July and August. And somehow it's just really annoying on a personal level to make people believe that somehow I'm on a golf course for 12 weeks or laying on the beach for 12 weeks or not in my office for 12 weeks in a row. It's just not right, and it's just wrong. And I see my colleagues in this building, I see them at public meetings out in the neighborhoods, I see them all over the place. So we're working. And I understand that the history of this summer recess is not really vested in Council's decision, but it vested it in the fact that the senior members of the government, because they had seniority, would take vacations in July and August. So having a hearing and being able to get a department head or get somebody to a table as a witness was a difficult thing to do in July and August because vacations were all kicking in. I'm going to be here all summer. I know many of my colleagues, if not all of them, are going to spend time in this building this summer, and I just wish people would stop promoting the fact that we get a 12-week vacation after we leave this room today. It is not true. And the next time an editorial writer wants to write it or a columnist wants to reporter wants to write it, I would ask you just to think about the fact that you see me Monday through Friday in July and August and it's an unfair characterization. Thank you.
Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilman Green.
Thank you, Madam President. I too want to talk a little bit about the School District and then about the budget that we passed, sort of two separate topics. In the first one, there have been lots of speculation today about who won and who lost the School District budget battle, the tax battles, et cetera. The truth of the matter is that you can say that children and families won in the short term, but in the long term, we still recognize that there are serious management and competency issues District, and this body and the state and others are going to have to be vigilant to make sure that next year we're not in this situation and the year after that we're not in this situation, et cetera. So in my view, the short-term winners, short term only, unless we do our job, are the children. I don't think anybody else won. The voters lost because they did not have the opportunity for a fair debate on the topic of whether or not we should provide more resources to the School District or raise taxes for that purpose during a primary election. We knew or the City knew, the School District knew since March 8th what the School District cuts were in the Governor's budget. We did not engage in an open dialogue about it. The Administration did not. The School District did not come to us until three weeks before the end of the fiscal year and required us to do that. voters lost for a chance for a public debate to be engaged in this process during a primary election campaign. I believe the Mayor lost, because four years in a row that he has proposed tax increases and four years in a row we've gotten them. So his budget address was a feel-good, no-new-taxes budget address. He lost his 15-year reputation as a tax cutter and a business-friendly Mayor. And he further demonstrated that failing to compromise ends up often and failing to involve Council at the front end of a process after making loud pronouncement often ends up in no good result, at least from the Mayor's perspective. I think the business community and the Chamber of Commerce lost, because they contravened their own stated, publicly known tax policy, which is to shift, not that we all agree with this, but it is to shift from business taxes to taxes, and they came before us with a letter, without even testifying, saying don't raise property taxes and we're silent on business taxes, inconsistent with their policy for the last ten years and Mayor's Tax Commission report on commission. I think taxpayers lost, for the obvious reason. I think that Council lost because we did not force harder choices on the City and the School District. We essentially said every single thing in the City's side of the budget is more important than yellow bus service and early childhood education, including tree planting and other things that we could have cut back on the City's side. I myself lost because I decided to vote for things I did not favor. I did it to prevent more harm, in my view, but I don't think it was particularly attractive, those compromises. The SRC lost because they did and they tried to take advantage of and actually create a crisis, and then demonstrated during their crisis their lack of management competence. In the end, I don't think anybody is happy with the result, which maybe means that we reached the proper compromise and right place, but I don't feel good about it for our future if we continue down this path of solving problems by taking the easy course rather than doing the difficult things and ultimately reducing the costs and size of government so that we don't have to be in the situation where the Administration and Mayor ask us for a tax increase every year. It's been four years in a row.
With respect to the budget, I really think we had a significant victory in the budget, Madam President. This is the first year that we have looked at some program-based budgeting and budgeting for outcome ideas. The Courts specifically requested $5 million so that they could put in place 850 electronic monitors, hire additional parole and probation officers, and they said to us in their testimony, if you do this, we will save you more than you invest in us. And we now have an opportunity to look at that kind of investment, and maybe it will shift the budget paradigm next year so we can be thinking about program-based budgeting and what we are going to get in return for our investment. So I'm very excited about that opportunity for the future. Thank you, Madam President.
Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilwoman Tasco.
Thank you, Madam President. I was going to comment first on Councilman Kenney's statement, but I'll comment on Councilman Green first. I'd say, as I said before, we had losses and everybody lost, but it's our responsibility at City Council to oversee the finances of the School District. We appropriate the taxes, as we did this morning, and we have every opportunity between now and the time they come to us to call them in, ask them what they're doing, ask them to present their financial picture. So, therefore, we can't abdicate our responsibility for oversight of the School District to anybody else except us. To Councilman Kenney, I just want to say to you, have a great summer, go on vacation, go in the sand, do what you want to do, because no matter what you do, you don't have enough ink to counter what they write in the newspaper. So they know that we're here. They know that we're working, but it's good news to say that we are not working. It's fuel for the fire. So go have a good time, because I am.
Thank you, Madam President. I will be brief. The last time I recall us having the type of marathon sessions and friendly but vigorous debate, public meetings and countless private meetings was during the debate of the stadiums, and when reflecting on that experience, I was very new, very green, but excited to learn. I will say to you that the good news for me is, over the last two weeks on a personal level, I've grown again in the legislative process. So I'm pleased and I join Councilman Jones in saying thank you for how we conducted ourselves. We were serious, we were diligent, we were assertive about our position, but ultimately we were all driving and seeking one goal, and that was to do what Councilman Green stated, to make sure the win, and rightfully so. So we honored our duties as elected officials to find the dollars for the School District. Do we agree on the accountability issues, legitimate accountability issues, that have been raised? No, we don't, but what we all fully recognize is that if we don't raise those difficult, tough questions, then we get what we get, which is nothing. So I thank my colleagues personally, and I really look forward to working this summer on the redistricting issue with Councilwoman Sanchez. We still have a lot of work to do. We asked to do this work, and so when we have to make the tough choices, we simply have to step up and do it with grace. Thank you, Madam President.
You're welcome. The Chair recognizes Councilman O'Neill.
Madam President, the kids were always going to get their money, if you want to put it in those terms. No one was ever in this Council I ever heard say wasn't going to be for funding at the level the Mayor had asked us to. So there's never been an issue about whether we were for the kids. The question is how did we go about being for the kids. That debate ended last week. There were three choices. There was enough votes for real estate tax, and we move forward. However, as we move forward and as we look at now two years in a row where there was a two-year temporary tax, real estate tax last year, a one-year temporary tax this year, next year those two taxes expire. Council will be asked to make one of two choices, at least one of two choices next year, one or two choices on actual value. When actual value is implemented next year, there needs to be a reset, a reduction in the millage. I'm is, but when we started talking about this ten years ago when David Glancey first proposed it at the Board of Revision of Taxes, it was always in any public meeting I attended that the first year of actual value, the government breaks even. There are enough people who win and enough people who lose that you don't need the government to be anything but neutral. We also know that there's going to be a tremendous amount of pressure next year to keep the revenues from those two temporary tax increases, last year's two year, this year's one year, in the City and School District budget. It is going to be the same difficult choice as to whether we look internally and stay neutral, internally either at surpluses, internally at savings, cost reductions or whether we decide to just go ahead and add whether it's the 14 percent or so or 20 percent kicker in for the government, and I just hope that next year we take at our options and that we don't have to go back and say, yeah, we have to agree that the taxpayers lost again this time. Thank you.
Thank you, Madam President. First I want to kind of respond to what Councilman O'Neill is saying. This real estate issue, by no means, is a an easy one, but as someone who represents a district that proportionately pays more taxes, I'm very concerned when we begin to talk about cutting funding or reducing taxes and not taking care of Philadelphia's most vulnerable. So as someone whose district stands to gain the most, I also don't want to lose sight that we have a city that has 25 percent of its population in poverty, 36 percent of our children, and that if in fact AVI is an opportunity for by them, that we totally close ourselves because, again, we want to follow the headlines about this revenue neutrality, whatever it means. So I just want to put that out there, because it is my district that disproportionately pays the taxes now, and unfortunately their voices are not as loud as the voices of the folks who know that they haven't been paying their fair share and that that day is coming. So I just want to put that on the record. As it relates to education, I will give tremendous credit to this Mayor who from day one really set a high bar as it relates to education, and as someone who spent many years working in public education before coming to this Council, he set a huge goal for himself and one that I want to help him achieve, because ultimately our ability to do anything that we want to do in this city is going to be based on our ability to educate the kids, create a workforce so that we can the jobs. So there is a huge interdependency on these very, very difficult issues. And then I want to end on this. I know Councilman Kenney spoke to the immigration issue. There are many advocates here today. This is an important issue, because as we begin to address redistricting and we begin to address the population stability and some will say growth in the City of Philadelphia, it has been based on this growing immigrant community that has existed here, and those things also are interrelated, and we have to be very careful about what we say in terms of being immigrant friendly and what we do when we allow certain policies and we make certain choices. So I invite my colleagues to join the advocates and the press after Council so that you can hear from them, because I really believe that if Philadelphia is going to be the fabulous it can be, all of the issues that we are debating here today become very important. And we've been given a vote of confidence by the voters, particularly this May, to look out for them, and sometimes that means looking out for people's interests is doing something that is not in their short-term interest. We have a responsibility to think broader and bigger, and I look forward to that opportunity with my colleagues in the summer as we work on redistricting and particularly next year as we finally tackle, finally tackle property taxes in a way that hopefully would be fair and allow Philadelphia to grow. Thank you.
Thank you. The Chair recognizes Councilwoman Blackwell.
Thank you, Madam President. all those statements that were made with regard to immigrants who are in our city. It's such an important issue, and I think we've spoken about that this day, and we thank Councilman Kenney for his legislation and his statements and my colleagues as well. As Chair of the City Council Committee on Education, I believe that everyone in this Council has been and is committed to our children. I don't agree that we should spend money on TransPasses and tokens to bring them down here to make the youth think that they have to fight a battle that is ours to fight. Having said that, I believe that many of us had different opinions on how to get here. It is what it is. But that we certainly will be in touch with everyone as the School District approaches us about meeting after the state budget is passed, and we look forward to those deliberations this to move forward to make sure that all school students and all of those who work for the District -- you know, these layoffs were awful and impossible, but we certainly look forward to meeting further in the summer with regard to the entire school issue. Thank you.
You're welcome. The Chair recognizes Councilman Clarke for a motion to adjourn.
Madam Chair, thank you, but before I call for an adjournment, I'd just like to say a couple of things. And I agree and concur with pretty much all of what my colleagues have said as it relates to this education issue, and it clearly goes much farther beyond education, because at the end of the day, we in the municipalities have had some significant fiscal challenges. About three weeks ago, Madam President, I got a phone call from MSNBC and they wanted to know, Councilman Clarke, would you come on and talk about education? I'm like, bet. Right? National news, local Councilperson. You don't usually get those kind of calls, right? And I said -- I thought it was an opportunity to talk about what I believe to be the real problem. And, yes, I agree that as an elected official in the City of Philadelphia, it is our responsibility to come up with solutions for education. It is our jurisdiction to impose taxes or other revenue sources to come up with support for the School District, but the reality is, Madam President, that this is a situation that happened as a result -- and people said it was going to happen -- of national policies that filtered down from the national level to the state level and now down to local municipalities that caused New Jersey to have to go to court to get fund local municipalities and their school districts, and hopefully at some point we will do the same. When you have a national policy, Madam President, that continues to allow the, quote/unquote, Bush tax cuts to go to people that make millions and millions of dollars and in order to pay for that, you have to cut money to the states and subsequently municipalities; when you have a national policy that every time the question of debt limits come up, people say, well, let's do a continuing resolution to ensure that we deal with the debt problem, but as a result of that, you cut money to states and municipalities; when you have a state -- and I hope this in no way, shape or form will send a signal that the state will not send us money, because we sorely need it, but when you have a state that takes the position that we're not going to impose a tax on shale to impose a tax on natural gas, clearly one of the products that has produced record profits over the last several years, and you have a state that says, well, we must have a six, seven hundred million dollar rainy day fund, and when we look at these school kids, it's raining every day on them, Madam President. So I get this opportunity to go on MSNBC, and for some reason, I actually thought I was going to be able to say this. So as I'm sitting in the little room with the Comcast Center behind me -and I now know what I see on MSNBC. That's where they are, right, the little room. I'm sitting there waiting, and they said, Councilman, you're going to be delayed a little bit, because Rick Santorum is making his presidential announcement. I said, All right, I understand. That's a little above my pay grade. So I sit there and wait, and I wait, and I wait. So, finally, they said, Councilman, he's wrapping up. You're coming on. I said, Okay, I'm ready. So, Madam President, I start talking about what I'm talking about today, and he said, Well, Councilman, what about the soda tax? Now, this is national level. I'm saying, Well, I thought I was going to be able to talk about these federal issues and these state issues. And I said what I said about the soda tax, and, Well, Councilman, what about the real estate tax? I'm like, wow, they wanted to focus on the municipality and those controversial issues as it relates to what we're doing here today.
And on a national level, they don't even want to talk about the real problem, is that these larger issues that trickles down to these local municipalities that cause us today taking these very difficult tax votes, similar to the one we took last year. And, Madam President, at some point we got to focus on the larger issue. It's above all of our pay grades. We do not get a vote in the Congress. I don't think in the foreseeable future any of us will, but at the end of the day, it needs to be put where the real issue is. We can't continue to have these federal and statewide policies that leave it on the local municipalities, because we end up going in the pockets of people who can least afford to pay it. So I just want to say, Madam President, that we will continue to work hard, and I want to congratulate all of the members who took whatever vote on whatever position you took. You were engaged, you worked hard, and I want to credit all of you. And, Madam President, as usual, you made sure that everybody had an opportunity to have input. ahead in the upcoming month and years, because this issue is not going away, it will be before us again next year, that you all continue to work hard and continue to do what you do. At the end of the day, make sure that you make the appropriate decision for the citizens of the City of Philadelphia. m. )
It has been moved and seconded that Council stand adjourned until Thursday, September 8th at 10 o'clock. All in favor will say aye. (Aye.)
The you. (Stated Meeting adjourned at 1:00 p.m.) CERTIFICATE I HEREBY CERTIFY that the proceedings, evidence and objections are contained fully and accurately in the stenographic notes taken by me upon the foregoing matter on June 23, 2011, and that this is a true and correct transcript of same. MICHELE L. MURPHY RPR-Notary Public (The foregoing certification of this transcript does not apply to any reproduction of the same by any means, unless under the direct control and/or supervision of the certifying reporter.)