Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller announced her retirement last week. I though this would be a good time to repost a slightly revised version of this piece, which I originally posted May 22, 2007.
I’ve been meaning to write a long piece about Donna Reed Miller’s role in the eighth district for a awhile. It is a fascinating story with all kinds of complications that provides an interesting view from which to explore race and class issues in our city.
This is not it. But it is a brief sketch for those who want to know more about the Eighth district.
I can sum Councilwoman Miller up with a story. I once met with her to discuss public financing of political campaigns. This was before Councilwomen Tasco and Verna with the encouragement of state representative Dwight Evans, decided to hold hearings on the subject. She was interested enough, but our conversation kept getting interrupted by constituents who were calling her on her cell phone for help with problems dealing with the government. One case was that of a woman whose gas had been turned off by PGW. Councilwoman Miller not only took the call personally but made the follow up call to PGW in my presence and got her constituent’s gas turned back on.
She promised to get back to me on campaign finance reform but nothing much came of it. I always suspected she turned the issue over to Dwight Evans and Councilwoman Taco.
Donna Reed Mills is as popular in some parts of the 8th district as she is unpopular in others.
She is popular in some neighborhoods, mostly in East Germantown because she does good constituent service for people who really need it. People who have had their gas turned off, who are having trouble with the water department, people who can’t get their streets cleaned of snow have all benefitted from the superb work Councilwoman Miller does on these problems.
She is also popular with some of the folks who worked with her on projects for the district, such as the Lonnie Young recreation center.
Councilwoman Miller owns up to this description, by the way. She got into politics doing constituent service and working with community groups for Dave Richardson. That’s what she likes to do best. And it’s the main reason she has stayed in office.
I am one of those people who have been helped with her, by the way. When I was president of West Mt. Airy Neighbors I had a very good relationship with her.
It didn’t start that way. I distinctly recall when I first heard of Donna. A WMAN Board member made fun of her mispronouncing the name of a local church and talked about her lack of attention to and concern for our part of the district.
So when WMAN held a meeting about a community issue–it might have been about the new ACME–no one thought to invite anyone from Councilwoman Miller’s office. And then, when Vernon Price, her administrative assistant held a meeting on the same issue he didn’t invite us. When we showed up he didn’t want to let us into the meeting. I protested and he relented. And we talked after the meeting a bit.
It occurred to me then that class, more than racial, differences might have had something to do with the tension between WMAN and Councilwoman Miller. I recognized that she could be important to us. And I liked Vernon Price right from the beginning. So I decided to start talking to Vernon as often as possible to see if we could perhaps build a better working relationship.
We did. Vernon became one of my best friends in Mt. Airy and Donna’s office began to trust me and WMAN. We worked closely with her office to bring a new Acme and CVS to the neighborhood and to accomplish a great deal on other smaller issues.
A few years later, when the Weaver’s Way co-op got into financial trouble, our relationships paid off in a big way for Mt. Airy as Councilwoman Miller worked hard to get the city’s help for our neighborhood store.
Even when political cross-pressures made it impossible for Councilwoman Miller to help us directly, she sometimes found indirect ways of doing so. When there was a very controversial issue concerning some historic building on Johnson Street–which a powerful black church wanted to demolish to make way for a new building–Donna didn’t directly help those of us who wanted to save it. But, by design she didn’t stand in our way either. She knew I had worked very hard to line up support for the historic designation of the buildings on Johnson Street. But she could have undermined my efforts. By staying neutral and taking no position, she made it possible for us to save the buildings without totally angering her constituents lower in the district. I’m sure she got some stuff about helping the white folks stand up to a black church–even though a majority of the people who wanted to save the buildings were black. I know she heard that because I heard it again and again. But she stood up to it.
After my testimony at the historical commission, when it was clear that we were on the way to victory, I was joking with Vernon at the side of the room. Some folks on our side got suspicious because they thought Donna Reed Miller was our enemy. But I knew that she had come through for us and I was thanking Vernon for the adroit way in which she handled a difficult situation. And he was thanking me for spending a half hour with Councilwoman Miller’s daughter before the hearing, giving her a little help with some homework for a course in the program at which I taught at Temple.
When she ran for reelection in 2003, I held a fund raiser for Councilwoman Miller which Mayor Street attended. It was not a great event. At one point, Vernon pulled me a side and said, “You’ve never done this before, have you?” But she appreciated it. And when I ran for State Representative in 2004, Donna did not stop some of her associates from working with me. And, again in a subtle way, she helped me out, by having a conversation with me in view of a large number of people after a vigil for a young man who had been shot while selling flowers on Hunting Park.
Other community groups in the district did not get on as well as Councilwoman Miller or her office.
She is unpopular in these parts of districts for a few reasons. The first, is that no one, including her greatest defenders will say that she has been a key legislative leader in Council. She has not been someone who has worked to introduce the kind of progressive legislation that many folks in the eighth district want. I should quickly mention, however, that Donna was the leader on council when it came to gun control
And then some people in both the northern and southern part of the district believe that she has given too much money—and too much unaccounted for money—to folks at Germantown Settlement who have not used it well. Or that she has favored certain developers and developments close to her at the expense of folks in the neighborhoods who opposed them. Anti-casino activists, for example, were upset at her lukewarm support for the Trump casino.
The dispute between Donna and groups in Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy is to some extent due to class differences with overtones of race as well. But that is not the case with regard to the disputes between her office and folks in Nicetown and Tioga and with anti-casino activists, where most of the leading activists are African American.
To some extent these disputes are due to the difficulty community groups have in working with her office. In my view, the trouble has come from both directions. Some community groups are distrustful of her. And her office returns the favor. Those of us who have worked with her have tried to overcome these disputes but by now, it is very difficult for other groups to do so. Her office is not inclined to forgive or forget any past slights or opposition. And the same is true of many community groups. When we worked on the Johnson Street issue, one of my biggest problems was getting people at other community groups to stop attacking Donna on the issue before she had done anything to hurt us. And, as I pointed out above, they were so distrustful of her that they didn’t recognize when and how much she was helping us.
In addition, lots of people all through the district believe that her office not been aggressive enough in developing plans and finding the funds to restore Germantown Avenue to its former glory, from Chestnut Hill to Nicetown.
But Councilwoman Miller has a base of support that has served her well in the multiple candidate races she has always run. That base is loyal to her because she has always served their most pressing needs.